==============================
43.0 The Emperor and the Golem
==============================
The Avocado team is proud to present another release: Avocado version
43.0, aka, "The Emperor and the Golem", is now available!
Release documentation: `Avocado 43.0
`_
The major changes introduced on this version are listed below,
roughly categorized into major topics and intended audience:
Users/Test Writers
==================
* The ``--remote-no-copy`` option has been removed. The reason is
that the copying of tests to the remote hosts (as set with
``--remote-hostname``) was also removed. That feature, while
useful to some, had a lot of corner cases. Instead of keeping a
feature with a lot of known caveats, it was decided that users
should setup the remote machines so that tests are available before
Avocado attempts to run them.
* The :mod:`avocado.utils.process` library, one of the most complex
pieces of utility code that Avocado ships, now makes it possible to
ignore background processes that never finish (while Avocado is
reading from their file descriptors to properly return their output
to the caller). The reason for such a feature is that if a command
spawn many processes, specially daemon-like ones that never finish,
the :func:`avocado.utils.process.run` function would hang
indefinitely. Since waiting for all the children processes to
finish is the right thing to do, users need to set the
``ignore_bg_processes`` parameter to ``True`` to request this newly
added behavior.
* When discovering tests on a directory, that is, when running
``avocado list /path/to/tests/directory`` or ``avocado run
/path/to/tests/directory``, Avocado would return tests in a non
predictable way, based on :func:`os.walk`. Now, the result is a
properly alphabetically ordered list of tests.
* The ZIP Archive feature (AKA as ``--archive`` or ``-z``) feature,
which allows to archive job results is now a proper plugin.
* Plugins can now be setup to run at a specific order. This is a
response to a user issue/request, where the ``--archive`` feature
would run before some other results would be generated. This
feature is not limited to plugins of type `result`. It allows
any ordering on the enabled set of plugins of a given plugin type.
* A contrib script that looks for a job result directory based on a
partial (or complete) job ID is now available at
``contrib/scripts/avocado-get-job-results-dir.py``. This should be
useful inside automation scripts or even for interactive users.
Documentation
=============
* Users landing on http://avocado-framework.readthedocs.io would
previously be redirect to the "latest" documentation, which tracks
the development master branch. This could be confusing since the
page titles would contain a version notice with the latest
*released* version. Users will now be redirected by default to the
latest *released* version, matching the page title, although the
version tracking the master branch will still be available at the
http://avocado-framework.readthedocs.io/en/latest URL.
Bugfixes
========
* During the previous development cycle, a bug where ``journalctl``
would receive `KeyboardInterrupt` received an workaround by using
the :mod:`subprocess` library instead of Avocado's own
:mod:`avocado.utils.process`, which was missing a default handler
for `SIGINT`. With the misbehavior of Avocado's library now
properly addressed, and consequently, we've reverted the workaround
applied previously.
* The TAP plugin would fail at the `end_test` event with certain
inputs. This has now been fixed, and in the event of errors, a
better error message will be presented.
Internal improvements
=====================
* The ``test_utils_partition.py`` selftest module now makes use of
the :func:`avocado.core.utils.process.can_sudo` function, and will
only be run when the user is either running as root or has sudo
correctly configured.
* Avocado itself preaches that tests should not attempt to skip
themselves during their own execution. The idea is that, once a
test started executing, you can't say it wasn't executed (skipped).
This is actually enforced in :class:`avocado.Test` based tests.
But since Avocado's own selftests are based on
:class:`unittest.TestCase`, some of them were using skip at the
"wrong" place. This is now fixed.
* The :class:`avocado.core.job.Job` class received changes that make
it more closer to be usable as a formally announced and supported
API. This is another set of changes towards the so-called "Job
API" support.
* There is now a new plugin type, named `result_events`. This
replaces the previous implementation that used
:class:`avocado.core.result.Result` as a base class. There's now a
single :class:`avocado.core.result.Result` instance in a given job,
which tracks the results, while the plugins that act on result
events (such as test has started, test has finished, etc) are based
on the :class:`avocado.core.plugins_interfaces.ResultEvents`.
* A new ``result_events`` plugin called ``human`` now replaces the
old `HumanResult` implementation.
* Ported versions of the TAP and journal plugins to the new
``result_events`` plugin type.
For more information, please check out the complete
`Avocado changelog
`_.
Release Meeting
===============
The Avocado release meetings are now open to the community via
Hangouts on Air. The meetings are recorded and made available on the
`Avocado Test Framework YouTube channel
`_.
For this release, you can watch the meeting on `this link
`_.
----
| Sprint theme: https://trello.com/c/r2fwf66S/853-sprint-theme-the-emperor-and-the-golem-1952