[Buildbot-devel] OS X, SVN and Buildbot

[Mark MacVicar]

Hi all,

I thought I would recount a recent problem I encountered involving OS
X, SVN and Buildbot, to pass on information to others (and elicit
sympathy).

We recently moved our subversion server, and switch authentication
from ssh to https. the Mac OS X buildslave didn't like this. I had the
buildslave running as a LaunchDaemon using the instructions here
http://buildbot.net/trac/wiki/UsingLaunchd. For reasons that aren't
clear, running it as a Daemon meant that it couldn't access the cached
authentication info in ~/username/.subversion, and was requesting a
password.

After banging my head and the internetz against this problem for a few
hours, I came across this info
(http://developer.apple.com/technotes/tn2005/tn2083.html#SECACCESSINGUSERSTATE)
stating that Mac Daemons can't reliably access user's home
directories.

To workaround the problem I set the buildslave up to run as a
LaunchAgent, with that user logging in at startup by default.


As another slight annoyance, Mac OS X 10.5 doesn't like "svn
--non-interactive" when using https (worked great under ssh). I found
several complaints around the internet abou this bug, but ended up
removing it from the Mac buildslave slave/commands.py.

Let me know if this sounds familiar to anyone.

Mark MacVicar