[Avocado-devel] Avocado release 0.31.0: Lucky Luke

[Cleber Rosa]

Hi everyone! Right on time for the holidays, Avocado reaches the end
of Sprint 31, and together with it, we're very happy to announce a brand
new release! This version brings stability fixes and improvements to
both Avocado and Avocado-VT, some new features and a major redesign of
our plugin architecture.

For Avocado the main changes are:

* It's now possible to register callback functions to be executed when
  all tests finish, that is, at the end of a particular job[1].
* The software manager utility library received a lot of love on the
  Debian side of things. If you're writing tests that install software
  packages on Debian systems, you may be in for some nice treats and
  much more reliable results.
* Passing malformed commands (such as ones that can not be properly
  split by the standard shlex library) to the process utility library
  is now better dealt with.
* The test runner code received some refactors and it's a lot easier
  to follow. If you want to understand how the Avocado test runner
  communicates with the processes that run the test themselves, you
  may have a much better code reading experience now.
* Updated inspektor to the latest and greatest, so that our code is
  kept is shiny and good looking (and performing) as possible.
* Fixes to the utility GIT library when using a specific local branch
  name.
* Changes that allow our selftest suite to run properly on virtualenvs.
* Proper installation requirements definition for Python 2.6 systems.
* A completely new plugin architecture[2]. Now we offload all plugin
  discovery and loading to the Stevedore library. Avocado now defines
  precise (and simpler) interfaces for plugin writers. Please be aware
  that the public and documented interfaces for plugins, at the
  moment, allows adding new commands to the avocado command line app,
  or adding new options to existing commands. Other functionality can
  be achived by "abusing" the core avocado API from within
  plugins. Our goal is to expand the interfaces so that other areas of
  the framework can be extended just as easily.

For a complete list of changes please check the Avocado changelog[3].

Avocado-VT received just too many fixes and improvements to
list. Please refer to the changelog[4] for more information.

Install avocado
---------------

Instructions are available in our documentation on how to install
either with packages or from source[5].

Within a couple of hours, updated RPM packages will be available in
the project repos for Fedora 22, Fedora 23, EPEL 6 and EPEL 7.

Happy hacking and testing!

---

[1] http://avocado-framework.readthedocs.org/en/0.31.0/ReferenceGuide.html#job-cleanup
[2] http://avocado-framework.readthedocs.org/en/0.31.0/Plugins.html
[3] https://github.com/avocado-framework/avocado/compare/0.30.0...0.31.0
[4] https://github.com/avocado-framework/avocado-vt/compare/0.30.0...0.31.0
[5] http://avocado-framework.readthedocs.org/en/0.31.0/GetStartedGuide.html