98.0 The Thing

The Avocado team is proud to present another release: Avocado 98.0, AKA “The Thing”, is now available!

Release documentation: Avocado 98.0

Users/Test Writers

• Avocado’s requirement management has been extended in a number of ways detailed bellow. In short, Avocado is now able to install requirements declared for a test in an isolated container if the --nrunner-spawner=podman is chosen (with a base image defined by --spawner-podman-image). That container image with the requirements fulfilled will only be built once, but a fresh environment will be used for every single test execution.

  • All requirements fulfilled will be recorded in a “cache database” so they will only need to be fulfilled once

  • Transparent support for the all spawners. This means that users of the podman spawner will have their requirements checked and fulfilled on the container image of their choice. As stated previously, that information will be kept in a requirement cache database. The container images will be available for super fast reuse after the first execution.

• When using the podman spawner, if the test URI looks like a filesystem path, it will be exposed read only to the container. This makes running Avocado tests inside containers transparent in many cases.

• A new type of plugin (avocado.core.plugin_interfaces.PreTest) has been introduced. It allows additional actions to be executed inside spawner environment before Test.

• avocado.core.nrunner.Runnable instances will now, under some circumstances, automatically include the current environment’s relevant and required configuration. This makes standalone executions of avocado-runner-* commands easier, while previously it would require manually entering all required configuration.

Utility Libraries

• A new method was added to avocado.utils.softwareraid that checks the existence of a software raid device.

• Four new functions were added to avocado.utils.disk.

• A function to check packet loss was added to avocado.utils.network.interfaces.

• avocado.utils.podman had a new get_container_info() method introduced.

Bug Fixes

• An issue that could have valid runner messages discarded (because of their timestamps), and thus the result of some tests disregarded, was fixed.

• Avocado test tags are now properly included in the test results.

• Avocado now supports actual file system limitation regarding the maximum file name length, instead of making assumptions about the limits. This allows Avocado to properly behave in environments such as containers backed by overlayfs.

• Tasks that are “skipped” due to their timeouts being hit now include the appropriate reason.

• Tests that produced warnings would result in WARN (which should be basically a PASS with warnings) even if they failed.

Internal Changes

• Disabling of network capabilities while building RPM packages on packit.

• Some tests that were being missed while running the coverage report are now included.

• Major changes to the static checks, dropping inspektor, updating many tools versions, and introducing the use of black as a code style check.

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