widelands-dev team mailing list archive

[Hans Joachim Desserud <launchpad@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Thank you for providing the links. Based on the different output it looks like several different things going wrong, though most network-related. The first one definitely has some deeper problems, because it is unable to connect to lots of default repos (line 475) before it starts running our script. Which unfortunately indicates a problem in travis or the build environment. The others I'm really sure what's actually failing.

I found an older blog post from travis talking about network issues (https://blog.travis-ci.com/2013-05-20-network-timeouts-build-retries/). One of the possible causes discussed is 
"There were indications that a network link got exhausted. This has some plausibility as we run up to 350 builds at the same time, pulling in lots of data from different sources."

If this is still happens, that could explain why it occurs and why it only happens randomly. They implemented a workaround: "Instead of running `sudo apt-get install something`, make it `travis_retry sudo apt-get install something`" to retry multiple times. It seems to do similar things to our workaround loops, except they also log how many attempts were made. I guess that would help the script, but I don't know if it is combinable now that I moved large parts into "addons.apt". Might be something to consider if we run into more problems in the future though. 

They also want people to report bugs if they run into strange issues, so we could do that if it continues to haunt us. Presumably they will be able to dig deeper for a given job and look up what else was going on on the machine at that time.

>So, let's merge this as is and revisit if it's making transient failures worse.

Agreed. I'll keep an eye on at least the trunk builds for a while. (Feel free to create a bug report with link to a build and ping me if I miss anything :) )
-- 
https://code.launchpad.net/~widelands-dev/widelands/travis-container/+merge/327492
Your team Widelands Developers is requested to review the proposed merge of lp:~widelands-dev/widelands/travis-container into lp:widelands.