Bug#582751: liblwp-online-perl: undeterministic FTBFS, belongs in volatile?

[Niko Tyni]

Package: liblwp-online-perl
Version: 1.07-1
Severity: important

This package fails to build in an undeterministic way for me on current sid:

  t/01_compile.t ... ok
  # 
  # Looking for the internet, this may take a few minutes if you are offline...
  # You are not online
  
  #   Failed test 'online() and offline() return opposite results'
  #   at t/02_main.t line 32.
  #          got: ''
  #     expected: '1'
  # Looks like you failed 1 test of 6.
  t/02_main.t ...... 
  Dubious, test returned 1 (wstat 256, 0x100)
  Failed 1/6 subtests 

Adding some debug instrumentation, I see that http://google.com doesn't
currently match /About Google/ at all, and fetching http://yahoo.com/
hangs part of the time.

There are currently five A records for yahoo.com, and one of them has
nothing listening on port 80. As LWP::Simple only tries one A record,
its get() fails 20% of the time, assuming the DNS server uses a uniform
distribution.

LWP::Online has a threshold of two get() errors for being offline,
and t/02_main.t tests this two times, so the results differ about 32%
of the time if my math is correct.

Possibly a retry loop around LWP::Simple::get() would fix this.
I'm not sure if the Google failure is transient, they seem
to have a special "PAC Man birthday" page up today.

I wonder if this package should go in volatile instead.
-- 
Niko Tyni   ntyni at debian.org