[Python-Dev] windows buildbot failures

[Tim Peters]

[Martin]
> I see a similar phenomenon (sp?)

Yup!  The plural is phenomena.

> on XP SP2: test_mailbox fails to
> me, with permission denied in some (random) test. I believe this
> is due to Tortoise SVN: test_mailbox creates a few directories,
> then Tortoise detects them (thanks to file change notifications)
> and tries to walk them, to find out whether that directory is
> under subversion control.
>
> Before Tortoise is done, test_mailbox tries to delete the directories.
> This (somewhat?) fails - there apparently is a "delete pending" state
> somehow in the system (sysinternals filemon sometimes shows DELETE PEND
> as the result of a call). Then, the next test will fail with permission
> denied.
>
> This is a heisenbug: different runs will fail in different tests, and
> letting sysinternals perform complete tracing make the failure go away.

I doubt Tortoise is at fault here, just because I never see that kind
of failure on my XP Pro SP2 box.  Tortoise is _always_ running here,
and it's also my buildbot box:  there have been over 400 buildbot runs
on it, none with "mystery failures" of this kind, and I routinely run
-uall release-build tests on it too.  It's not that Tortoise is
inactive, either.  To the contrary, it's a major pig:  since I
rebooted yesterday, TSVNCache.exe has sucked up > 17 minutes(!) of CPU
time, and read up well over a gigabyte from disk.

My box isn't magically immune to this kind of problem:  I have
Copernic Desktop Search installed, and if I enable its "Index new and
modified files on the fly" option, then all sorts of things fail in
intermittent "permission denied" ways -- from Python tests to CVS
updates (unsure about SVN updates -- haven't specifically tried that).

IIRC, of the similar reports on c.l.py over the last year that got
resolved, all were pinned on background indexing apps (like Copernic)
or antivirus software.

None of which proves that Tortoise isn't to blame on your box :-)