62.0 Farewell

The Avocado team is proud to present another release: Avocado version 62.0, AKA “Farewell”, is now available!

Release documentation: Avocado 62.0

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

Users/Test Writers

  • The avocado.Test.srcdir attribute has been removed, and with it, the AVOCADO_TEST_SRCDIR environment variable set by Avocado. This was done after a deprecation period, so tests should have been modified by now to make use of the avocado.Test.workdir instead.

  • The avocado.Test.datadir attribute has been removed, and with it, the AVOCADO_TEST_DATADIR environment variable set by Avocado. This was done after a deprecation period, so tests should have been modified by now to make use of the avocado.Test.get_data() instead.

  • The avocado.utils.cpu.set_cpuidle_state() function now takes a boolean value for its disable parameter (while still allowing the previous integer (0/1) values to be used). The goal is to have a more Pythonic interface, and to drop support legacy integer (0/1) use in the upcoming releases.

  • avocado.utils.astring.ENCODING is a new addition, and holds the encoding used on many other Avocado utilities. If your test needs to convert between binary data and text, we recommend you use it as the default encoding (unless your test knows better).

  • avocado.utils.astring.to_text() now supports setting the error handler. This means that when a perfect decoding is not possible, users can choose how to handle it, like, for example, ignoring the offending characters.

  • When running a process by means of the avocado.utils.process module utilities, the output of such a process is captured and can be logged in a stdout/stderr (or combined output) file. The logging is now more resilient to decode errors, and will use the replace error handler by default. Please note that the downside is that this may produce different content in those files, from what was actually output by the processes if decoding error conditions happen.

  • The avocado.utils.astring.tabular_output() will now properly strip trailing whitespace from lines that don’t contain data for all “columns”. This is also reflected in the (tabular) output of commands such as avocado list -v.

Bug Fixes

  • Users of the avocado.utils.service module can now safely instantiate the service manager multiple times. It was previously limited to a single instance per interpreter.

  • The avocado.utils.vmimage library default usage broke with the release of Fedora 28, which added a different directory layout for its cloud images. This has now been fixed and should allow for a successful image = avocado.utils.vmimage() usage.

Internal Changes

  • Refactor of the avocado.utils.asset module, in preparation for new functionality.

  • The avocado.utils.cpu module now treats reads/writes to/from /proc/* and /sys/* as binary data.

  • The selftests for the avocado.utils.cpu module will now run under Python 3 (>= 3.6), due to more detailed checks of capable mock versions.

  • The test that serves as the example for the whiteboard feature has been simplified, and the more complex test moved to selftests.

  • Package builds with make rpm are now done with the systemd-nspawn based chroot implementation for mock.

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/4KtpSeGT/1305-sprint-theme-farewell-2009