58.0 Journey to the Christmas Star

The Avocado team is proud to present another release: Avocado version 58.0, AKA “Journey to the Christmas Star”, is now available!

Release documentation: Avocado 58.0

The major changes introduced on this version are listed below, roughly categorized into major topics and intended audience:

Users/Test Writers

  • The avocado.utils.vmimage library now contains support for Avocado’s own JeOS image. A nice addition given the fact that it’s the default image used in Avocado-VT and the latest version is available in the following architectures: x86_64, aarch64, ppc64, ppc64le and s390x.

  • Avocado packages are now available in binary “wheel” format on PyPI. This brings faster, more convenient and reliable installs via pip. Previously, the source-only tarballs would require the source to be built on the target system, but the wheel package install is mostly an unpack of the already compiled files.

  • The installation of Avocado from sources has improved and moved towards a more “Pythonic” approach. Installation of files in “non-Pythonic locations” such as /etc are no longer attempted by the Python setup.py code. Configuration files, for instance, are now considered package data files of the avocado package. The end result is that installation from source works fine outside virtual environments (in addition to installations inside virtual environments).

  • Python 3 has been enabled, in “allow failures mode” in Avocado’s CI environment. All static source code checks pass, and most of the unittests (not the functional tests) also pass. It’s yet another incremental steps towards full Python 3 support.

Bug Fixes

  • The avocado.utils.software_manager library received improvements with regards to downloads of source packages, working around bugs in older yumdownloader versions.

Internal Changes

  • Spelling exceptions and fixes were added throughout and now make spell is back to a good shape.

  • The Avocado CI checks (Travis-CI) are now run in parallel, similar to the stock make check behavior.

For more information, please check out the complete Avocado changelog.

Release Meeting

The Avocado release meetings are now open to the community via Hangouts on Air. The meetings are recorded and made available on the Avocado Test Framework YouTube channel.

For this release, you can watch the meeting on this link.

Sprint theme: https://trello.com/c/lHnzJT06/1208-sprint-theme-journey-to-the-christmas-star