[Python-Dev] Strategies for debugging buildbot failures?

[Mark Dickinson]

Thanks for all the feedback.

[Michael Foord]
> At Resolver Systems we regularly extend the test framework purely
> to provide more diagnostic information in the event of test failures.
> We do a lot of functional testing through the UI, which is particularly
> prone to intermittent and hard to diagnose failures.

Seems like a sound approach in general.  It seems awkward to apply
the method to this particular failure, though.  I guess one would need
extra code in regrtest.py to catch the invalid signal, for a start.

[Martin v. Löwis]
> Buildbot also supports submission of patches directly to the
> slaves. This is currently not activated, and clearly requires
> some authentication/authorization; if you want to use that,
> I'd be happy to experiment with setting it up, though.
> [...]
> In the past, for the really difficult problems, we arranged to
> have the developers get access to the buildbot slaves.

Thanks, Martin.  I think I've pretty much run out of time to
pursue this particular problem for the moment;  I may return
to it later.  It's good to know that these options are available,
though.

Mark