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

[Santiago Vila]

On Wed, Dec 14, 2016 at 11:34:31PM +0100, gregor herrmann wrote:
> On Tue, 13 Dec 2016 17:53:55 +0100, Santiago Vila wrote:
> 
> > Package: src:libx11-protocol-other-perl
> > Version: 28-1
> > Severity: serious
> > 
> > I tried to build this package in stretch with "dpkg-buildpackage -A"
> > (which is what the "Arch: all" autobuilder would do to build it)
> > but it failed:
> 
> > Test Summary Report
> > -------------------
> > t/XSetRoot.t                  (Wstat: 65280 Tests: 0 Failed: 0)
> >   Non-zero exit status: 255
> >   Parse errors: Bad plan.  You planned 7 tests but ran 0.
> > Files=47, Tests=1111, 12 wallclock secs ( 0.13 usr  0.02 sys +  1.08 cusr  0.08 csys =  1.31 CPU)
> > Result: FAIL
> 
> 
> Thanks for your bug report.
> 
> Could you maybe test with 29-1 which I just uploaded?
> It has changes in the tests but I'm not sure if they address the
> issues you discovered.

Thanks a lot for acting on this bug so quickly.

Yes, I'll try to trigger a bunch of rebuilds tomorrow.

But bear in mind that the failure rate for this one is about 90% on
the single-CPU virtual machines I use. I would really love to see this
failure to happen in your machine as well.

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).

Some weeks ago I naively believed that all the FTBFS-randomly bugs
were already reported, but I was very wrong, people keep uploading NEW
packages for unstable which suffer from this problem every day...

I wish we had a "D" day in the Release Managers calendar for stretch:

[D] Last day to upload packages that only build half of the time :-)

Anyway, I am lucky that you and Niko really care about this kind of
bugs (not everybody does, just see the list above). You are my
personal heroes in this battle against build randomness.

Thanks.