The Next LTS

The Long Term Stability releases of Avocado are the result of the accumulated changes on regular (non-LTS) releases.

This section tracks the changes introduced on each regular (non-LTS) Avocado release, and gives a sneak preview of what will make into the next LTS release.

What’s new?

When compared to the last LTS (52.x), the main changes to be introduced by the next LTS version are:

  • A new loader implementation, that reuses (and resembles) the YAML input used for the varianter yaml_to_mux plugin. It allows the definition of test suite based on a YAML file, including different variants for different tests. For more information refer to YAML Loader (yaml_loader).
  • A better handling of interruption related signals, such as SIGINT and SIGTERM. Avocado will now try harder to not leave test processes that don’t respond to those signals, and will itself behave better when it receives them. For a complete description refer to Signal Handlers.
  • The output generated by tests on stdout and stderr are now properly prefixed with [stdout] and [stderr] in the job.log. The prefix is not applied in the case of $test_result/stdout and $test_result/stderr files, as one would expect.
  • Test writers will get better protection against mistakes when trying to overwrite avocado.core.test.Test “properties”. Some of those were previously implemented using avocado.utils.data_structures.LazyProperty() which did not prevent test writers from overwriting them.
  • Avocado can now run list and run standard Python unittests, that is, tests written in Python that use the unittest library alone.
  • Improvements in the serialization of TestIDs allow test result directories to be properly stored and accessed on Windows based filesystems.
  • The complete output of tests, that is the combination of STDOUT and STDERR is now also recorded in the test result directory as a file named output.
  • Support for listing and running golang tests has been introduced. Avocado can now discover tests written in Go, and if Go is properly installed, Avocado can run them.
  • The support for test data files has been improved to support more specific sources of data. For instance, when a test file used to contain more than one test, all of them shared the same datadir property value, thus the same directory which contained data files. Now, tests should use the newly introduced get_data() API, which will attempt to locate data files specific to the variant (if used), test name, and finally file name. For more information, please refer to the section Accessing test data files.
  • The output check feature will now use the to the most specific data source location available, which is a consequence of the switch to the use of the get_data() API discussed previously. This means that two tests in a single file can generate different output, generate different stdout.expected or stderr.expected.
  • When the output check feature finds a mismatch between expected and actual output, will now produce a unified diff of those, instead of printing out their full content. This makes it a lot easier to read the logs and quickly spot the differences and possibly the failure cause(s).
  • Sysinfo collection can now be enabled on a test level basis.

Complete list of changes

For a complete list of changes between the last LTS release (52.0) and this release, please check out the Avocado commit changelog.