Re: Finding cause of test fails on the cfbot site

On 2/17/21 3:42 PM, Thomas Munro wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 18, 2021 at 9:18 AM Andrew Dunstan <andrew(at)dunslane(dot)net> wrote:
>> On 2/17/21 11:06 AM, Tom Lane wrote:
>>> Peter Smith <smithpb2250(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
>>>> I saw that one of our commitfest entries (32/2914) is recently
>>>> reporting a fail on the cfbot site [1]. I thought this was all ok a
>>>> few days ago.
>>>> ...
>>>> Is there any other detailed information available anywhere, e.g.
>>>> logs?, which might help us work out what was the cause of the test
>>>> failure?
>>> AFAIK the cfbot doesn't capture anything beyond the session typescript.
>>> However, this doesn't look that hard to reproduce locally ... have you
>>> tried, using similar configure options to what that cfbot run did?
>>> Once you did reproduce it, there'd be logs under
>>> contrib/test_decoding/tmp_check/.
>> yeah. The cfbot runs check-world which makes it difficult for it to know
>> which log files to show when there's an error. That's a major part of
>> the reason the buildfarm runs a much finer grained set of steps.
> Yeah, it's hard to make it print out just the right logs without
> dumping so much stuff that it's hard to see the wood for the trees;
> perhaps if the Makefile had an option to dump relevant stuff for the
> specific tests that failed, or perhaps the buildfarm is already better
> at that and cfbot should just use the buildfarm client directly. Hmm.
> Another idea would be to figure out how to make a tarball of all log
> files that you can download for inspection with better tools at home
> when things go wrong. It would rapidly blow through the 1GB limit for
> stored "artefacts" on open source/community Cirrus accounts though, so
> we'd need to figure out how to manage retention carefully.

I did some thinking about this. How about if we have the make files and
the msvc build system create a well known file with the location(s) to
search for log files if there's an error. Each bit of testing could
overwrite this file before starting testing, and then tools like cfbot
would know where to look for files to report? To keep things clean for
other users the file would only be created if, say,
PG_NEED_ERROR_LOG_LOCATIONS is set. The well known location would be
something like "$(top_builddir)/error_log_locations.txt", and individual
Makefiles would have entries something like:,

override ERROR_LOG_LOCATIONS =
$(top_builddir)/contrib/test_decoding/tmp_check/log

If this seems like a good idea I can go and try to make that happen.

cheers

andrew

--

Andrew Dunstan
EDB: https://www.enterprisedb.com