[Python-Dev] latest bsddb3 test problems (original) (raw)

Jeremy Hylton jeremy at alum.mit.edu
Tue Sep 23 11:21:45 EDT 2003

On Tue, 2003-09-23 at 05:23, Anthony Baxter wrote:

On a friend's debian testing machine, the bsddb test suite crashes with a deadlock on some occasions. On a Mac OS X machine, the test suite hangs :-(

On the Mac OS X machine, the bsddb3 stuff doesn't get built under 2.3. On the other hand, code using bsddb seems to work fine, so it's almost certainly just that the test suite needs to be fixed to not be broken.

I think the question is whether the tests are doing something completely artificial that fails, or if they are simply provoking failures that would be particularly difficult to provoke in real life applications.

In Zope's BDBStorage, we've definitely seen some weird behavior. For example, we had a bug in our code where we tried to delete an entry from a BTree that did not exist. That operation failed with a DBNotFoundError. We caught that error can called txn.abort(); the abort failed with a DBRunRecoveryError. We didn't have any idea what the abort would fail in that case.

It may be that we misunderstood how to use the Berkeley storage, but it leaves me with the uneasy feeling that something isn't right. The failing tests make me feel the same way.

Jeremy

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