[Python-Dev] x86 XP trunk failure

[David Bolen]

"Martin v. Löwis" <martin at v.loewis.de> writes:

>> My build slave (http://www.python.org/dev/buildbot/trunk/x86%20XP%20trunk)
>> keeps failing because of a crash that appears to be in the bsddb
>> module.  I assume the master deems the slave to be lost because it's
>> sitting there waiting on me to make a choice on the "debug/abort"
>> dialog box.
>
> What branch, and for how long has this dialog been sitting around?
>
> For crashes in 3.0, there should not be any such dialogs anymore, but
> there may have been before I turned them off.

I think there may actually be an issue here, if only with the tests,
even though 3.0 does suppress the dialog.  I think I started noticing
this in the first build after bringing my buildbot online, so I think
on Sep 1.  I had manually done on a build on Aug 28 (running the
buildbot batch file interactively) without the problem, but I haven't
been able to find any relevant source tree changes in that interval.
Re-fetching from that date has the problem, and I had blown away my
older tree when starting up the buildbot officially (of course :-().

At least for me, it's happening on 2.5 and trunk (hard to tell about
3.0, but that's dying without a dialog), so I thought it might have
been something backported.  But it also appears common to more
platforms than just Windows - it's just Windows that pops up that
dialog.

In my case, the actual dialog doesn't pop up until the end of the
tests, and it seems to be occurring only if test_bsddb3 has run during
the tests.  On other platforms, it just shows up as a warning message,
which doesn't serve to mark the tests as failing (e.g., OS X and
FreeBSD) - at the of the test you get a message of:

warning: DBTxn aborted in destructor.  No prior commit() or abort().

which I tracked back to an abort() call within the bsddb library as
final destruction is happening at Python exit. (When clearing the
test_bsddb module, and the bsddb wrapper tries to access a log file
related to an open transaction).  So perhaps there's an issue with how
one or more of the tests are constructed, or cleanup or something.  I
haven't narrowed it down further yet though.

As with Alan, more details are available as needed.  While it seems to
show up in the full test run on more platforms, I have a harder time
forcing it by just running test_bsddb3 on FreeBSD, for example, while I
get the dialog consistently on Windows.

-- David