73.0 Pulp Fiction

The Avocado team is proud to present another release: Avocado 73.0, AKA “Pulp Fiction”, is now available!

Release documentation: Avocado 73.0

Users/Test Writers

  • INSTRUMENTED tests using the avocado.core.test.Test.fetch_asset() can take advantage of plugins that will attempt to download (and cache) assets before the test execution. This should make the overall test execution more reliable, and give better test execution times as the download time will be excluded. Users can also manually execute the avocado assets command to manually fetch assets from tests.

  • The still experimental “N(ext) Runner” support for Avocado Instrumented tests is more complete and supports tag filtering and passing tags to the tests.

  • A new architecture for “finding” tests has been introduced as an alternative to the avocado.core.loader code. It’s based around the avocado.core.resolver, and it’s currently used in the still experimental “N(ext) Runner”. It currently supports tests of the following types: avocado-instrumented, exec-test, glib, golang, python-unittest and robot. You can experiment it by running avocado nlist, similarly to how avocado list is used.

  • Avocado sysinfo feature file will now work out of the box on pip based installations. Previously, it would require configuration files tweaks to adjust installation paths.

  • A massive documentation overhaul, now designed around guides to different target audiences. The “User’s Guide”, “Test Writer’s Guide” and “Contributor’s Guide” can be easily found as first lever sections contain curated content for those audiences.

Bug Fixes

  • Content supposed to be UI only could leak into TAP files, making them invalid.

  • Avocado’s sysinfo feature will now run commands without a shell, resulting in more proper captured output, without shell related content.

  • avocado.utils.process.SubProcess.send_signal() will now send a signal to itself correctly even when using sudo mode.

Utility APIs

  • The avocado.utils.vmimage library now allows a user to define the qemu-img binary that will be used for creating snapshot images via the avocado.utils.vmimage.QEMU_IMG variable.

  • The avocado.utils.configure_network module introduced a number of utilities, including MTU configuration support, a method for validating network among peers, IPv6 support, etc.

  • The avocado.utils.configure_network.set_ip() function now supports different interface types through a interface_type parameter, while still defaulting to Ethernet.

Internal Changes

  • Package support for Enterprise Linux 8.

  • Increased CI coverage, having tests now run on four different hardware architectures: amd64 (x86_64), arm64 (aarch64), ppc64le and s390x.

  • Packit support adding extended CI coverage, with RPM packages being built for Pull Requests and results shown on GitHub.

  • Pylint checks for w0703 were enabled.

  • Runners, such as the remote runner, vm runner, docker runner, and the default local runner now conform to a “runner” interface and can be seen as proper plugins with avocado plugins.

  • Avocado’s configuration parser will now treat values with relative paths as a special value, and evaluate their content in relation to the Python’s distribution directory where Avocado is installed.

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