Re: 'CVS-Unknown' buildfarm failures?

Tom Lane said:
> meerkat and snake both have persistent "CVS-Unknown" failures in some
> but not all branches.  I can't see any evidence of an actual failure in
> their logs though.  What I do see is "?" entries about files that
> shouldn't be there --- for instance, meerkat apparently needs a "make
> distclean".  If that's what's causing the failure report, could we get
> the buildfarm to show a more useful status message?  I'd always assumed
> that "CVS-Unknown" suggested a transient problem such as
> connection loss, and there wasn't any need for human intervention.
>
> A more radical answer is to have the script go ahead and delete the
> offending files itself, but I can see where that might not have good
> fail-soft behavior ...
>


cvs-unknown means there are unknown files in the repo:
  my $unknown_files = grep {/^\?/ } @cvslog;
...  send_result('CVS-Unknown',$unknown_files,\@cvslog)    if ($unknown_files);

This is almost always a case of operator error. buildfarm only ever builds
in a copy of the repo, not in the permanent repo itself, so there should
NEVER be any file there which does not come from CVS. I have repeatedly
advised buildfarm member owners not to build by hand in the buildfarm repos.Not everybody listens, apparently.

All this is intended to ensure that we are actually working on a faithful
reflection of the postgresql.org repo, and not something that has been
mangled somehow.

I can call it "CVS-Unknown-Files" if that will make it clearer.

cheers

andrew