[Python-Dev] buildbot svn exceptions again... (original) (raw)

"Martin v. Löwis" martin at v.loewis.de
Sat May 15 22:45:35 CEST 2010

Bill Janssen wrote:

parc-leopard-1 (and most of the other builders) are failing the svn checkout with the following error:

svn: PROPFIND of '/projects/python/trunk': Could not resolve hostname `svn.python.org': Temporary failure in name resolution (http://svn.python.org) When I log into that machine as "buildbot" and do the svn checkout manually using the following command /usr/bin/svn checkout --non-interactive --no-auth-cache --revision HEAD http://svn.python.org/projects/python/trunk build it works fine.

That's a common OSX problem/bug. Processes occasionally lose the ability to resolve host names. Various theories float around what's causing this (most commonly, people expect that a "controlling terminal" must be present); my theory is this:

There is a Mach port in the system that lets a process talk to the local resolver (lookupd, or whatever Apple's naming infrastructure is called today). For some reason, this port gets closed in a "background" process, perhaps because the parent process closed it when you logged out. Or the Kerberos credentials expired, or some such...

In short, if some OS X expert could shed some light on this, it would be appreciated. It would then be good to add this to the wiki. See also

http://buildbot.net/trac/wiki/UsingLaunchd http://developer.apple.com/mac/library/technotes/tn2005/tn2083.html

Regards, Martin

More information about the Python-Dev mailing list