Bug#971806: python-hdf5storage's autopkg tests fail in unstable

[Drew Parsons]

On 2020-10-12 14:23, Graham Inggs wrote:
> On Mon, 12 Oct 2020 at 05:18, Drew Parsons <dparsons at debian.org> wrote:
>> Must have been a temporary package inconsistency?
>> 
>> All tests are passing now.
> 
> The autopkgtest looks flaky to me [1].  I see successes and failures
> with the same triggers.



Looks like they might be generating random file names using random 
numbers without guaranteeing uniqueness. So with random.randint(1, 100) 
in play, there's a "1%" probability of name clash.

The exact problem is hard to pin down, i.e. the error message doesn't 
clearly match a filename clash.
For instance a recent amd64 error is

ERROR: 
test_write_readback.TestPythonMatlabFormat.test_dtype_structured_with_offsets_titles
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Traceback (most recent call last):
   File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/nose/case.py", line 197, in 
runTest
     self.test(*self.arg)
   File 
"/tmp/autopkgtest-lxc.58_whuw2/downtmp/autopkgtest_tmp/tests/test_write_readback.py", 
line 862, in test_dtype_structured_with_offsets_titles
     np.dtype(desc).itemsize + random.randint(1, 100)
ValueError: title already used as a name or title.



But the indicated code line "np.dtype(desc).itemsize + random.randint(1, 
100)" is just a random value for the field 
desc_with_itemsize['itemsize']. What does it have to do with names?  Not 
clear why the indicated ValueError is triggered by this.

Drew