[Avocado-devel] Avocado release 36.3 (LTS)

[Cleber Rosa]

This is an announcement for the users of our Long Term Stability version
of Avocado.  This is a minor release that introduces bug fixes that are
considered important to our users.

Bugfixes
========

 * When checking for remote Avocado versions, ignore '\r'.  This improves
   the stability of remote checks when error messages (usually from plugins)
   follow the version number given when running "avocado -v".

 * When sysinfo generates output that can not be decoded as UTF-8, the HTML
   report will not embed its contents.  The user can still check the output
   file on the job results directory for the generated content.

 * The HTML report will also list the files that failed to be embedded into
   the report itself.

 * The local test runner loader will not attempt to discover tests when
   tests are to be run on a remote system and will *not* be copied to the
   remote system.  Basically, if users gives the '--remote-no-copy' option,
   tests will not be attempted to be discovered locally.

 * The logging mechanisms in Avocado, which would replace the basics
   sys.stdout and sys.stderr could cause random failures resulting in crashes.
   Multiple users have reported different failures resulting in different
   crashes.  In the end, this fix greatly increases the stability of
   Avocado.

For a full list of changes, please refer to:

 https://github.com/avocado-framework/avocado/compare/36.2...36.3

LTS in a nutshell
=================

The LTS releases have a special cycle that lasts for
18 months.  Avocado usage in production environments should favor the
use of this LTS release, instead of non-LTS releases.

For more information, please refer to:

 https://www.redhat.com/archives/avocado-devel/2016-May/msg00025.html
 https://www.redhat.com/archives/avocado-devel/2016-April/msg00038.html

Install Avocado
===============

Instructions are available in our documentation on how to install
either with packages or from source:

 http://avocado-framework.readthedocs.io/en/36lts/GetStartedGuide.html#installing-avocado

Updated RPM packages are be available in the project repos for EPEL 6,
EPEL 7, Fedora 23 (for the last time), Fedora 24 and now also for the newly
released Fedora 25. 

Users subscribed to the LTS "channel", will get this 36.3 update, while
users using the non-LTS repo, will probably be running 44.0 after an update.

Happy hacking and testing!

-- 
Cleber Rosa
[ Sr Software Engineer - Virtualization Team - Red Hat ]
[ Avocado Test Framework - avocado-framework.github.io ]