Re: [Monotone-devel] what exactly is tests/spawn_redirected_hook_helper testing?

[Zack Weinberg]

On Fri, May 8, 2009 at 5:23 AM, Timothy Brownawell <address@hidden> wrote:
> On Sun, 2009-04-05 at 17:46 -0700, Zack Weinberg wrote:
>> The 0.43 package for Debian is failing to build on several of their
>> architectures because tests/spawn_redirected_hook_helper is unreliable
>> on a heavily loaded machine; there's a race where one of the processes
>> created by the test can hang around and create a file just when the
>> test runner is trying to blow away the test directory, causing that to
>> fail.  I'm pretty clear on how the race happens, but I'm not sure what
>> the test is actually *testing*, so it's not clear how to fix it.
>> Anyone know?
>
> ...how does it happen? The only thing that I'd think would be specific
> to that test is the "cp" that's spawned in the hook, but it waits for
> that on line 18 so it should be gone when the test ends (plus the last
> "check" would fail if that was the problem, which should make it *not*
> blow away the directory for that test).

I added both the wait on line 18 of the hook and the "check" line that
I think you're referring to, in revision
ca9e27455b19faae0b4381613a18dec47a46b1de.  This does seem to have
eliminated the race condition, but may well have made the test no
longer test anything meaningful...

zw