[Avocado-devel] Avocado release 38.0: Love, Ken

[Cleber Rosa]

Hello everyone,

You guessed it right: this is another Avocado release announcement:
release 38.0, aka "Love, Ken", is now out!

Another development cycle has just finished, and our community will
receive this new release containing a nice assortment of bug fixes and
new features.

* The download of assets in tests now allow for an expiration time.
   This means that tests that need to download any kind of external
   asset, say a tarball, can now automatically benefit from the
   download cache, but can also keep receiving new versions
   automatically.

   Suppose your asset uses an asset named `myproject-daily.tar.bz2`,
   and that your test runs 50 times a day.  By setting the expire time
   to `1d` (1 day), your test will benefit from cache on most runs, but
   will still fetch the new version when the the 24 hours from the
   first download have passed.

   For more information, please check out the documentation on the
   `expire` parameter to the `fetch_asset()` method[1].

* Environment variables can be propagated into tests running on remote
   systems.  It's a known fact that one way to influence application 
behavior,
   including test, is to set environment variables.  A command line such 
as::

     $ MYAPP_DEBUG=1 avocado run myapp_test.py

   Will work as expected on a local system.  But Avocado also allows
   running tests on remote machines, and up until now, it has been
   lacking a way to propagate environment variables to the remote
   system.

   Now, you can use::

     $ MYAPP_DEBUG=1 avocado run --env-keep MYAPP_DEBUG \
       --remote-host test-machine myapp_test.py

* The plugin interfaces have been moved into the
   `avocado.core.plugin_interfaces` module.  This means that plugin
   writers now have to import the interface definitions this namespace,
   example::

     ...
     from avocado.core.plugin_interfaces import CLICmd

     class MyCommand(CLICmd):
     ...

   This is a way to keep ourselves honest, and say that there's no
   difference from plugin interfaces to Avocado's core implementation,
   that is, they may change at will.  For greater stability, one should
   be tracking the LTS releases.

   Also, it effectively makes all plugins the same, whether they're
   implemented and shipped as part of Avocado, or as part of external
   projects.

* A contrib script for running kvm-unit-tests.  As some people are
   aware, Avocado has indeed a close relation to virtualization
   testing.  Avocado-VT is one obvious example, but there are other
   virtualization related test suites can Avocado can run.

   This release adds a contrib script that will fetch, download,
   compile and run kvm-unit-tests using Avocado's external runner
   feature.  This gives results in a better granularity than the
   support that exists in Avocado-VT, which gives only a single
   PASS/FAIL for the entire test suite execution.

For more information, please check out the Avocado changelog[2].

Also, while we focused on Avocado, let's also not forget that
Avocado-VT maintains it's own fast pace of incoming niceties.

* s390 support: Avocado-VT is breaking into new grounds, and now has
   support for the s390 architecture.  Fedora 23 for s390 has been added
   as a valid guest OS, and s390-virtio has been added as a new machine
   type.

* Avocado-VT is now more resilient against failures to persist its
   environment file, and will only give warnings instead of errors when
   it fails to save it.

* An improved implementation of the "job lock" plugin, which prevents
   multiple Avocado jobs with VT tests to run simultaneously.  Since
   there's no finer grained resource locking in Avocado-VT, this is a
   global lock that will prevent issues such as image corruption when
   two jobs are run at the same time.

   This new implementation will now check if existing lock files are
   stale, that is, they are leftovers from previous run.  If the
   processes associated with these files are not present, the stale
   lock files are deleted, removing the need to clean them up manually.
   It also outputs better debugging information when failures to
   acquire lock.

The complete list of changes to Avocado-VT are available on its
changelog[3].

While not officially part of this release, this development cycle saw
the introduction of new tests on our avocado-misc-tests. Go check it
out!

Finally, since Avocado and Avocado-VT are not newly born anymore, we
decided to update information mentioning KVM-Autotest, virt-test on so
on around the web.  This will hopefully redirect new users to the
Avocado community and avoid confusion.

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

Instructions are available in our documentation on how to install
either with packages or from source[4].

Updated RPM packages are be available in the project repos for EPEL 6,
EPEL 7, Fedora 22, Fedora 23 and the newly released Fedora 24.

Please note that on the next release, we'll drop support for Fedora 22
packages.

Happy hacking and testing!

---

[1] http://avocado-framework.readthedocs.io/en/38.0/WritingTests.html
[2] https://github.com/avocado-framework/avocado/compare/37.0...38.0
[3] https://github.com/avocado-framework/avocado-vt/compare/37.0...38.0
[4] 
http://avocado-framework.readthedocs.io/en/38.0/GetStartedGuide.html#installing-avocado