[Python-Dev] Buildbot report, August 2017

[Victor Stinner]

Hi,

Here is a quick report of what changed recently on buildbots.


== pythoninfo ==

I added a new "python3 -m test.pythoninfo" command which is now run on
Travis CI, AppVeyor and buildbots.

    https://bugs.python.org/issue30871

This command dumps various informations to help debugging test
failures on our CIs. For example, you get the Tcl version, information
about the threading implementation, etc.

Currently, pythoninfo is only run on the master branch, but I plan to
run it on Python 3.6 and 2.7 later.

The pythoninfo idea comes from https://bugs.python.org/issue29854 when
we didn't know the readline version of a buildbot, and I didn't want
to put such information in regrtest header, since importing readline
has side effects.


== Removed buildbots ==

A few buildbots were removed:

* All Python 3.5 buildbots was removed, since the 3.5 branch entered
the security only stage:
  https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2017-August/148794.html

* FreeBSD 9-STABLE (koobs-freebsd9): FreeBSD 9 is no more supported
upstream, use FreeBSD 10 and FreeBSD CURRENT buildbots

* OpenIndiana: was offline since the beginning of June. Previous discussions on
  this list:

  * September 2016: OpenIndiana and Solaris support
    https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2016-September/146538.html
  * April 2015: MemoryError and other bugs on AMD64 OpenIndiana 3.x
    https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2015-April/138967.html
  * September 2014: Sad status of Python 3.x buildbots
    https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2014-September/136175.html

* intel-ubuntu-skylake: Florin Papa wrote me that the machine became
  unavailable in December 2016.

* Yosemite ICC buildbot (intel-yosemite-icc): it was maintained by Zachary Ware
  and R. David Murray. Sadly, David lost the VM image to a disk crash :-( New
  ICC buildbots may come back later, wait & see ;-)

* macOS Snow Leopard (murray-snowleopard): this old machine was stuck
at boot for an unknown reason. "It's an old machine, and it is
probably time to get rid of it." wrote R. David Murray :-)


== Reduced failure rate ==

As usual, many race conditions were fixed in tests and in the code, to
reduce the buildbot failure rate.

I may list them in a blog post, later.


== What's Next? ==

* Buildbot should be upgrade to buildbot 0.9:
   https://github.com/python/buildmaster-config/pull/12

* Zachary Ware plans to rewrite our buildbot configuration during the
CPython sprint (Sept 4-9)

* test_logging fails randomly on FreeBSD 10 with a warning related to
threads (bpo-30830). I was trying to reproduce the bug since 2 months.
I just identified to root bug! https://bugs.python.org/issue31233
"socketserver.ThreadingMixIn leaks running threads after
server_close()".

* The "Docs" buildbot (currently offline) may be dropped as well,
https://github.com/python/buildmaster-config/pull/21


See also my previous buildbot report:
https://haypo.github.io/python-buildbots-2017q2.html

Victor