79.0 La vita è bella

The Avocado team is proud to present another release: Avocado 79.0, AKA “La vita è bella”, is now available!

This releases contains mainly internal changes in preparation for the N(ext)Runner architecture to replace the current one. It’s expected that an LTS release will be done within the next two or three releases, before the switch the current runner architecture is deprecated and removed.

Release documentation: Avocado 79.0

Users/Test Writers

  • The Remote, VM and Docker runner plugins have been deprecated. The current implementation would require a major rewrite to be compatible with the new Fabric API (currently uses the Fabric3 API). Also, the N(ext)Runner architecture requires that individual tests be executed in isolated environments (be them local or remote) and the current implementation actually runs a complete Avocado Job so it’s not suitable to be reused in the N(ext)Runner.

  • The Avocado docstring directives (the ones that go into docstrings and are prefixed with :avocado:) now support requirement entries. Those will be used as part of the “Requirements Resolver” features, as per BP002.

  • The --ignore-missing-references option, which used to take a on or off parameter, now takes no parameter. Now, the feature it controls is not enabled unless you supply the command line option (but no on or off is required).

Bug Fixes

  • When using the Job API (with the conventional runner or the N(ext)Runner) the job.log ended up being empty empty, but now it produces just like when using the Avocado command line tool. This fix is part of the stabilization effort to declare the Job API as supported soon.

  • Fixed an issue with the avocado.core.safeloader that would return duplicate tests when both a parent and child class implemented methods with the same name.

  • Fixed an issue in the avocado.core.utils.cpu.cpu_has_flags() that could cause a crash because of a mixed used of bytes coming from reading /proc/cpuinfo and a string based regex.

Utility APIs

  • The avocado.utils.gdb.GDBRemote implementation of the GDB Remote Protocol now deals with bytes (instead of possibly multibyte strings), more in line with the original protocol specification.

  • Users of the avocado.utils.partition.mount() can now skip checking if the devices/mountpoints are mounted, which is useful for bind mounts.

  • The avocado.utils.cpu.online() and avocado.utils.cpu.offline() will now check the status of the CPU before attempting to apply a possibly (unnecessary) action.

  • The avocado.utils.software_manager.DnfBackend now properly implements a build_dep functionality, which differs from its parent avocado.utils.software_manager.YUMBackend.

Internal Changes

  • Optional plugins (shipped by Avocado) will now require a matching Avocado version. This should prevent users from having installation and usage problems with versions mismatch.

  • A number of selftests were ported from unittest.TestCase to avocado.Test, making use of Avocado’s features and following a “eat your own dog food” approach.

  • A new code style lint check is now enforced, W601, which drops the use of has_key() in favor for the key in idiom.

  • The N(ext)Runner main module, avocado.core.nrunner, now has two explicit registries for the two different types of supported runners. The first one, avocado.core.nrunner.RUNNERS_REGISTRY_STANDALONE_EXECUTABLE is populated at run time with standalone executable runners available on the system (those named avocado-runner-$kind). The second one, avocado.core.nrunner.RUNNERS_REGISTRY_PYTHON_CLASS contains Python based runner implementations, which are currently set manually following a class implementation definition (but may be converted to dynamic lookups, such as setuptools’ entrypoints in the future).

  • The N(ext)Runner example job is one way of checking the progress of its integration into the overall Avocado framework. It’s been broken, but it’s now back to operation status and being used by the release process in the jobs/timesensitive.py job, which has replaced the make check-full rule.

  • The N(ext)Runner standard runner implementations, say, avocado-runner-exec-text, will now create an “output directory” on behalf of the test, and communicate its location via the AVOCADO_TEST_OUTPUT_DIR environment variable. Further work will implement the retrieval and storage of individual tests’ output into an organized Avocado Job result structure.

  • The nrun command, a temporary entrypoint into the N(ext)Runner, will now show a list of tasks that failed with fail or error results, which can be helpful while debugging Avocado’s own selftests failures (or for those brave enough to be running nrun already).

  • A number of optional plugins, including resultsdb, results_upload, varianter_cit and varianter_pict have been migrated to the “future” settings API, which delivers a consistent configuration between command line, configuration files and Job API usage.

  • Documentation improvements on the Fetching asset files section, and on the explanation of the current and The “nrunner” test runner architecture.

  • Because the minimum supported Python version was lifted from 3.4 to 3.5 back in Avocado version 74.0, it was possible, but not done before, to upgrade the asyncio syntax from the asyncio.coroutine() and yield from to the more modern async def and await syntax.

  • Python 3.8 is now formally supported, being enabled in the Python package manifest, and being actively tested on our CI.

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