Bug#848060: libx11-protocol-other-perl: FTBFS randomly (failing tests)

[tony mancill]

On Thu, 15 Dec 2016 00:44:59 +0100 Santiago Vila <sanvila at unex.es> wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 14, 2016 at 11:34:31PM +0100, gregor herrmann wrote:
...<snip>...
> What follows might look as a rant but it's not:
>
> Perhaps I need to describe my building environment more accurately so
> that people (in general) can reproduce more easily the FTBFS-randomly
> bugs I report?
>
> I ask because the number of bugs of this kind I've reported is already
> too high:
>
> https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?tag=ftbfs-randomly;users=sanvila@debian.org
>
> and I should really not be the only person to reproduce them.
> If a package really FTBFS randomly, everybody should be able to
> "reproduce the randomness" (so to speak).

Hi Santiago,

If you could provide more information about your build environment as you
offer above, that would be appreciated.  This bug has the potential to
prevent clusterssh from being shipped with stretch, which is something I
would like to avoid.

I suspect that the set of test cases that are failing are either due to
assumptions that the test author made about the build environment, or
they could pertain to a dependency of libx11-protocol-other-perl.  Which
is to say, I don't believe that they necessarily reflect the quality of
the module itself (but then again, I might be off base).

I built the package locally 65 times in a row successfully until I
observed a test hang once with the perl process consuming a full core,
but I haven't yet reproduced your build failure.  (However, I did
observe the same test failure in the reproducible-builds [1]).

So if you could provide details about your build environment that
might make the failure more readily reproducible, I would
appreciate it.  And thank you for helping ferret out flakey tests.

Cheers,
tony

[1] https://tests.reproducible-builds.org/debian/rb-pkg/unstable/amd64/libx11-protocol-other-perl.html