[Python-Dev] windows buildbot failures (original) (raw)

Tim Peters tim.peters at gmail.com
Sun Apr 23 20:55:21 CEST 2006

[Martin]

I see a similar phenomenon (sp?)

Yup! The plural is phenomena.

on XP SP2: testmailbox fails to me, with permission denied in some (random) test. I believe this is due to Tortoise SVN: testmailbox creates a few directories, then Tortoise detects them (thanks to file change notifications) and tries to walk them, to find out whether that directory is under subversion control.

Before Tortoise is done, testmailbox tries to delete the directories. This (somewhat?) fails - there apparently is a "delete pending" state somehow in the system (sysinternals filemon sometimes shows DELETE PEND as the result of a call). Then, the next test will fail with permission denied. This is a heisenbug: different runs will fail in different tests, and letting sysinternals perform complete tracing make the failure go away.

I doubt Tortoise is at fault here, just because I never see that kind of failure on my XP Pro SP2 box. Tortoise is always running here, and it's also my buildbot box: there have been over 400 buildbot runs on it, none with "mystery failures" of this kind, and I routinely run -uall release-build tests on it too. It's not that Tortoise is inactive, either. To the contrary, it's a major pig: since I rebooted yesterday, TSVNCache.exe has sucked up > 17 minutes(!) of CPU time, and read up well over a gigabyte from disk.

My box isn't magically immune to this kind of problem: I have Copernic Desktop Search installed, and if I enable its "Index new and modified files on the fly" option, then all sorts of things fail in intermittent "permission denied" ways -- from Python tests to CVS updates (unsure about SVN updates -- haven't specifically tried that).

IIRC, of the similar reports on c.l.py over the last year that got resolved, all were pinned on background indexing apps (like Copernic) or antivirus software.

None of which proves that Tortoise isn't to blame on your box :-)

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