[Avocado-devel] Avocado release 0.33.0: Lemonade Joe or Horse Opera

[Cleber Rosa]

Avocado release 0.33.0: Lemonade Joe or Horse Opera
===================================================

Hello big farmers, backyard gardeners and supermarket reapers! Here is
a new announcement to all the appreciators of the most delicious green
fruit out here. Avocado release 0.33.0, aka, Lemonade Joe or Horse
Opera, is now out!

The main changes in Avocado are:

* Minor refinements to the Job Replay feature introduced in the last
  release.
* More consistency naming for the status of tests that were not
  executed. Namely, the TEST_NA has been renamed to SKIP all across
  the internal code and user visible places.
* The avocado Test class has received some cleanups and
  improvements. Some attributes that back the class implementation but
  are not intended for users to rely upon are now hidden or removed.
  Additionally some the internal attributes have been turned into
  proper documented properties that users should feel confident to
  rely upon.  Expect more work on this area, resulting in a cleaner
  and leaner base Test class on the upcoming releases.
* The avocado command line application used to show the main app help
  message even when help for a specific command was asked for. This
  has now been fixed.
* It's now possible to use the avocado process utility API to run
  privileged commands transparently via SUDO. Just add the "sudo=True"
  parameter to the API calls and have your system configured to allow
  that command without asking interactively for a password.
* The software manager and service utility API now knows about
  commands that require elevated privileges to be run, such as
  installing new packages and starting and stopping services (as
  opposed to querying packages and services status).  Those utility
  APIs have been integrated with the new SUDO features allowing
  unprivileged users to install packages, start and stop services more
  easily, given that the system is properly configured to allow that.
* A nasty "fork bomb" situation was fixed. It was caused when a SIMPLE
  test written in Python used the Avocado's "main()" function to run
  itself.
* A bug that prevented SIMPLE tests from being run if Avocado was not
  given the absolute path of the executable has been fixed.
* A cleaner internal API for registering test result classes has been
  put into place. If you have written your own test result class,
  please take a look at avocado.core.result.register_test_result_class.
* Our CI jobs now also do quick "smoke" checks on every new commit
  (not only the PR's branch HEAD) that are proposed on github.
* A new utility function, binary_from_shell_cmd, has been added to
  process API allows to extract the executable to be run from complex
  command lines, including ones that set shell variable names.
* There have been internal changes to how parameters, including the
  internally used timeout parameter, are handled by the test loader.
* Test execution can now be PAUSED and RESUMED interactively! By
  hitting CTRL+Z on the Avocado command line application, all processes
  of the currently running test are PAUSED. By hitting CTRL+Z again,
  they are RESUMED.
* The Remote/VM runners have received some refactors, and most of the
  code that used to live on the result test classes have been moved
  to the test runner classes. The original goal was to fix a bug, but
  turns out test runners were more suitable to house some parts of the
  needed functionality.

For a complete list of changes please check the Avocado changelog[1].

For Avocado-VT, there were also many changes, including:

* A new utility function, get_guest_service_status, to get service
  status in a VM.
* A fix for ssh login timeout error on remote servers.
* Fixes for usb ehci on PowerPC.
* Fixes for the screenshot path, when on a remote host
* Added libvirt function to create volumes with by XML files
* Added utility function to get QEMU threads (get_qemu_threads)

And many other changes. Again, for a complete list of changes please
check the Avocado-VT changelog[2].

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

Instructions are available in our documentation on how to install
either with packages or from source[3].

Updated RPM packages are be available in the project repos for
Fedora 22, Fedora 23, EPEL 6 and EPEL 7.

Happy hacking and testing!

---

[1] https://github.com/avocado-framework/avocado/compare/0.32.0...0.33.0
[2] https://github.com/avocado-framework/avocado-vt/compare/0.32.0...0.33.0
[3] http://avocado-framework.readthedocs.org/en/latest/GetStartedGuide.html#installing-avocado