Flaky autopkgtests

[Athos Ribeiro]

Nut 2.8 introduced changes to its systemd services. Namely, they no longer use PID files, which are heavily used in the package dep8 test suite. As a consequence, the Debian package had to fallback to running tests using the sysV init scripts instead (which rely on such PID files).

As it has been reported in the past (LP: #1291378), there are some race conditions in the tests, which are being dealt with through sleep calls.

Lately, these sleeps calls have not been enough to allow the tests to succeed consistently.

On an attempt to change the tests to use systemd, The race conditions started to happen more often.

This should be fixed when https://github.com/networkupstools/nut/issues/1590 is fixed upstream (i,e, when sd_notify support is added).

[Athos Ribeiro (athos-ribeiro)]

This patch should be a first step towards using the systemd service to run the autopkgtest suite after the sd_notify is supported.

[Athos Ribeiro (athos-ribeiro)]

To avoid constantly blocking other packages migration due to this flaky test, we probably want to disable this offending one for the time being.

[Laurent Bigonville (bigon)]

Hello,

I would be really happy if this could be fixed in debian as well/first

[Athos Ribeiro (athos-ribeiro)]

Hi Laurent,

Thanks for the reply. I have been following Debian's #1023530 (thanks for linking). However, it seems the hardware used for the CI is quite different in each infrastructure, changing the frequency in which the tests fail (these tests have been failing more often in Ubuntu; I tried to adjust the sleeps throughout the code, but I could not find a reasonable/reliable value that would get these tests to pass consistently in Ubuntu).

The only reason I decided not to forward this one to Debian now was because "just disabling" the tests does not seem to be a good approach in case such tests are indeed passing in Debian. I will take a second look into the sleeps to see if I can find sth that works both for Debian and Ubuntu. Hopefully the upstream sd_notify support issue will be addressed soon.

Thoughts?

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

This bug was fixed in the package nut - 2.8.0-6ubuntu1

---------------
nut (2.8.0-6ubuntu1) lunar; urgency=medium

  * Skip flaky tests. (LP: #1998481)

 -- Athos Ribeiro <email address hidden> Thu, 05 Jan 2023 10:23:48 -0300

[Athos Ribeiro (athos-ribeiro)]

I filed LP: #2019316 to track the sd_notify support. Once 2.8.1 is out, we can start working on re-enabling these tests.