ChangeLog¶

Note

This changelog contains only a summary of changes. For a more accurate accounting of development history please inspect the source history directly.

Plainbox 0.25 (unreleased)¶

plainbox startprovider may now be run with an –empty option that generates very basic provider that has only ./manage.py file. Use this option when you know your way around, and you want to quickly start developing plainbox jobs without any other jobs polluting your provider.
Plainbox now supports a new flag explicit-fail. Using that flag makes manual failing of the job require a comment to be entered. This flag naturally makes sense only for ‘manual’, ‘user-interact-verify’, ‘user-verify’ jobs.

Plainbox 0.24¶

Add a dependency on guacamole.
Plainbox ignores trailing garbage after EOF while reading IOLog zip. See https://bugs.python.org/issue24301.
Session assistant now preserves job ordering from test plans.
Session assistant ignores calls to finalize_session when the session has already been finalized. This lets application call finalization freely without having to keep that state information in them.
Plainbox expands the SessionAssistant initializer API

app_version: so that we can use this implicitly in some places,

e.g. don’t resumes sessions created by future versions, etc.

api_version: so that we can change usage expectations over time

but let applications stay compatible by using a fixed API version. This can be changed to a __new__ call that returns a versioned SA class instead of doing if-then-else magic in all the places.

api_flags: so that we can allow applications to opt-into optional

features and so that we can adjust expectations accordingly. This will also allow us to easily compare applications for feature parity.

For now all new arguments have sane defaults. Once all applications are patched the defaults will go away.
Plainbox now supports a new way to express the estimated duration of jobs and test plans that is much easier for humans to read and write. Instead of having to mentally parse 3725 you can just write 1h 2m 5s or 1h:2m:5s.
Plainbox now supports an after job ordering constraint. This constraint is very similar to the existing depends constraint, except that the outcome of the referenced job is not important. In practical terms, even if one job runs and fails, another job that runs after it, will run.

This constraint is immediately useful to all attachment jobs that want to collect a log file from some other operation, regardless of the outcome of that operation. In the past those would have to be carefully placed in the test plan, in the right order. By using the after constraint, the attachment jobs will automatically pull in their log-generating cousins and will run at the right time no matter what happens.
Plainbox now allows more than one resource object to be used in a resource expression. This can be used to construct resource expressions that combine facts from multiple sources (e.g. the manifest resource with something else).

As an important implementation limitation please remember that the complexity of such resource programs is proportional to the product of the number of resource objects associated with each resource in an expression. In practice it is not advised to use resource objects with more than a few resource records associated with them. This is just an implementation detail that can be lifted in subsequent versions.

Examples of the usage of this feature can be found in the TPM (Trusted Platform Module) provider.
https://launchpad.net/plainbox/+milestone/0.24

Plainbox 0.23¶

Mandatory jobs - jobs may be marked as mandatory - this way they are always executed - useful for jobs that get information about hardware. Use mandatory_include test plan field to mark the jobs you want always to be run.
Bootstrapping jobs - applications may run jobs that generate other jobs prior to the execution of the ‘normal’ list of jobs. Use bootstrap_include field of the test plan to list all jobs that generate other jobs.

Read more about mandatory and bootstrapping jobs in plainbox test plan unit
Plainbox now supports a new flag has-leftovers, that governs the behavior of leftover file detection feature. When this flag is added to a job definition files left over by the execution of a command are silently ignored.
Plainbox now supports a new flag on job definitions simple that is meant to cut the boiler-plate from fully automated test cases. When this flag is added to a job definition then many otherwise mandatory or recommended features are disabled.

Plainbox 0.18¶

Note

This version is under active development. The details in the milestone page may vary before the release is finalized.

This is a periodic release, containing both bug fixes and some minor new features. Details are available at:

https://launchpad.net/plainbox/+milestone/0.18

Warning

API changes were not documented for this release. We are working on a new system that will allow us to automatically generate API changes between

Plainbox 0.17¶

This is an (out-of-cycle) periodic release, containing both bug fixes and some minor new features. Details are available at:

https://launchpad.net/plainbox/+milestone/0.17

Warning