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

[Eduardo Habkost]

On Thu, Apr 06, 2017 at 12:38:31PM -0400, Cleber Rosa wrote:
[...]
> >>> Do you have any suggestions for making the test result output
> >>> from those scripts easily consumable by the Avocado test runner?
> >>>
> >>
> >> If those tests are treated as SIMPLE tests, then all of their output
> >> will automatically be added to the Avocado logs.
> >>
> >> Now, I do understand what your hopes are (or were after my possibly
> >> disappointing recommendations :).  Ideally, Avocado would be able to
> >> find the tests available on your standalone scripts[6], would know how
> >> to run the individual tests[7].  Right now, this requires writing a
> >> plugin.  I can see some ideas for a "Python universal" plugin here, that
> >> would find other hints of tests in plain Python source code.  If you
> >> think that makes sense, let's discuss it further.
> >>
> > Actually we already have `robot` plugin which is able to discover
> > `robot`-like tests. How about creating a `unittest` loader, which would
> > do the `avocado-find-unittest` and discover them individually? By
> > default nothing would change as the `.py` files would be recognized as
> > instrumented/simple tests, but when you change the order of loaders it'd
> > detect them as unittests:
> > 
> 
> Eduardo mentioned that he'd eventually get rid of the unittest
> dependency.  That's why I was suggesting/brainstorming about an even
> more generic way of providing hints that there are tests on a Python
> source file.

I planned to get rid of the unittest dependency because it did
not seem useful to me. But if it provides Avocado test discovery
ability for free, I would probably keeping it.

Now, another problem is that I wish a test granuality that
requires running QEMU at least once during the test discovery
phase (e.g. one test case for each machine-type/device/CPU).
Maybe this will break some assumptions in Avocado?

Are tests able to get a few input parameters during thest
discovery? e.g. I want to tell the test script/module the list of
QEMU binaries I want to test. Today I use an environment variable
or command-line parameter for that.

-- 
Eduardo