[Avocado-devel] Tips for making a standalone test script Avocado-friendly?

[Eduardo Habkost]

Hi,

I have been writing a few standalone Python scripts[1] to test
QEMU recently, and I would like to make them more useful for
people running tests using Avocado.

Most of them work this way:
1) Query QEMU to check which
   architectures/machine-types/CPU-models/devices/options
   it supports
2) Run QEMU multiple times for each
   architectures/machine-types/CPU-models/devices/options
   combination I want to test
3) Report success/failure/skip results (sometimes including
   warnings) for each combination

I would like to keep the test scripts easy to run without
installing extra dependencies, so I want them to keep working as
standalone scripts even if Avocado modules aren't available.
Adding a few "if avocado_available:" lines to the script would be
OK, though.

Do you have any suggestions for making the test result output
from those scripts easily consumable by the Avocado test runner?


[1] Some examples:
    https://github.com/ehabkost/qemu-hacks/blob/work/device-crash-script/scripts/device-crash-test.py
    https://github.com/ehabkost/qemu-hacks/blob/work/x86-query-cpu-expansion-test/tests/query-cpu-model-test.py
    https://github.com/ehabkost/qemu-hacks/blob/work/query-machines-bus-info/tests/qmp-machine-info.py
    (Note that some of the scripts use the unittest module, but I
    will probably get rid of it, because the list of test cases I
    want to run will be generated at runtime. I've even wrote
    code to add test methods dynamically to the test class, but I
    will probably remove that hack because it's not worth the
    extra complexity)

-- 
Eduardo