Issues converting cache_dirs configuration option as list in _avocado/core/settings.py _as_list(value) method

[dnegreira]

Describe the bug
If I add a custom directory on avocado.conf with the example:

[datadir.paths]
base_dir = /build/avocado/data
logs_dir = /build/avocado/data/job-results
cache_dirs = /build/avocado/data/cache

At a certain point a method is called to convert the cache_dirs to a list, but ast will fail with an error since it contains special (/) characters in it.

Steps to reproduce
Can reproduce it in two ways:
By setting the above in avocado.conf and running python3.10 test --select=unit

After a bit of debugging I could find the same behavior that _as_list(value) is doing by following the quick example on python CLE.

>>> import ast
>>> bla = '/build/avocado/data/cache'
>>> print(ast.literal_eval(bla))
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "/usr/lib/python3.10/ast.py", line 64, in literal_eval
    node_or_string = parse(node_or_string.lstrip(" \t"), mode='eval')
  File "/usr/lib/python3.10/ast.py", line 50, in parse
    return compile(source, filename, mode, flags,
  File "<unknown>", line 1
    /build/avocado/data/cache
    ^

Expected behavior
_as_list(value) should return the string as a list.

Current behavior
The above errors mentioned.

System information (please complete the following information):

• OS: lsb_release -a
• Ubuntu 22.04
• Avocado version: avocado -v
• 103
• Avocado installation method: pip, rpm, github ?
• Trying to package it in Ubuntu and failing unit tests :-)
  Maybe relevant to the bug:
  Python version: python3 3.10.6-1~22.04

Additional information
Currently working on an effort to package avocado-framework into Ubuntu/Debian.

[dnegreira]

And of course I had to use a list as a value, not a string and that worked :)

[richtja]

Hi @dnegreira, thank you for reporting this. I can confirm that I was able to reproduce it.