[Python-Dev] Status of the Buildbot fleet and related bugs

[Mark Dickinson]

On Fri, Nov 6, 2009 at 3:53 AM, R. David Murray <rdmurray at bitdance.com> wrote:

>    (1) issue 3864: FreeBSD testing hangs consistently.  According to the
>        ticket this is a FreeBSD bug fixed in 6.4, so an OS upgrade
>        on the buildslave would probably solve it.

I think the particular issue mentioned in 3864  is fixed, in some sense:
test_signal used to hang, but now just plain fails in a reasonable amount of
time (~15 seconds) instead.  So at least the test_signal failure isn't
preventing us from seeing the results of other tests.

The big problem now on the FreeBSD buildbot is that test_multiprocessing
reliably causes the whole test run to abort with 'Signal 12'.  Solving this
may be as simple as just getting someone to install a copy of FreeBSD 6.2
on an ssh-accessible machine so that the source of the error can be tracked
down.

>    (2) issue 4970: consistent signal 32 error on the norwitz-x86 Gentoo
>        buildslave in 3.1 and 3.x.  This may be due to the box
>        running an old threading library, but it does make one wonder what
>        changed in 3.x that exposed it.

This error has been happening since well before 3.0 was released.  Asking
for access to Neal's machine is probably the only sensible way to diagnose
it. (A less invasive but slower way to debug would be to create a branch
especially for this bug and do repeated runs to figure out which part of test_os
is causing the failure.)

> Another issue that I've seen on the buildbots but that doesn't
> seem to be showing up right now (is it fixed?) is issue 7251, which
> Mark is working on.

It's not fixed, but I hope to have time to fix it this weekend.  It's just
not showing up on some runs because test_multiprocessing kills the
buildslave first.  :-)

> So, overall I think the buildbot fleet is in good shape, and if
> we can nail issue 6748 I think it will be back to being an
> important resource for sanity checking our checkins.

Wholeheartedly agreed!  Sorting out the FreeBSD test_multiprocessing
Signal 12 would be nice, too.  I'll open an issue for this, unless
someone else gets there first.

Mark