Re: 'CVS-Unknown' buildfarm failures?

Andrew Dunstan <andrew@dunslane.net> writes:
> I suppose I could provide a switch to turn it off ... in one recent case 
> the repo was genuinely not clean, though, so I am not terribly keen on 
> that approach - but I am open to persuasion.

No, I agree it's a good check.  Just wondering if we can reduce the
number of false positives.  The recent meerkat failures, for instance,
were *not* false positives.

Looking at the snake failures of this type on HEAD, I do see that the 
complaints are all about subdirectories that should have been pruned,
which makes Andrew's theory seem plausible.  Maybe we should file this
behavior as a cvs bug.

Sudden thought: is there any particularly good reason to use the cvs
update -P switch in buildfarm repositories?  If we simply eliminated
the create/prune thrashing for these directories, it'd fix the problem,
if Andrew's idea is correct.  Probably save a few cycles too.  And since
people are really not supposed to be using these checkouts for anything
else, they don't need to be pretty.
        regards, tom lane