Preface

Tutorials - Preface

These tutorials are intended as a guide for complete Avocado n00bs. We assums that the reader is familiar with the fundamentals of operating virtual machines and has a basic command of the Python programming language. Note that the content is specific to the highly unique Avocado-I2N setup; just as the original Avocado documentation doesn't map to the local setup to a large extent, the instructions given below are not sufficient to operate a vanilla Avocado installation.

Format

The tutorial text is written in reStructuredText, the language of the Python documentation. It has been formatted to conform to standard terminal dimensions and should thus be readable right away. Those who prefer different formats can convert it to a variety of targets using the Docutils or Pandoc.

The files created during the tutorial are intended as a skeleton for future additions to the sample test set, ready to be extended by whoever is tasked with writing new tests. There is not necessarily a one-to-one correspondence between the snippets presented here and the actual tutorial files in the current repository's sample test suite. Functionality-wise they are identical, but the files contain additional comments, docstrings and log messages that would only clutter the presentation. Nevertheless the tutorial code should work out of the box without further additions. If it doesn't then congrats, you've just discovered a bug!

Definitions

Throughout the tutorials, when referring to directories within tp-repo/tp_i2n we will use the directory name instead of the relative path. For example, when we say "configs directory" we are referring to tp-repo/tp_folder/configs. This avoids repetition and extra work if those names change.