[users at bb.net] More anecdotes.

[Neil Gilmore]

Hi everyone,

Congrats on rc4.

More anecdotes from rc1. I got tangled up a bit trying to get 
multi-master working. I'm still not sure why all the parts would build 
one day, then not the next (in this case, it was setuptools). Nor why 
crossbar requires libffi to be installed on one machine but not the 
other. Nor why SQLAlchemy will be downloaded and installed automatically 
but not psycopg2. These troubles seem to have straightened themselves 
out, and I have multi-master buildbots in sandboxes on 2 different 
machines. There's light at the end of the tunnel, I hope.

As side note, Pierre, I ended up scripting the whole install/build/run 
thing. That may have to do for a tutorial.

I got asked for help with a builder. Seems it was taking inordinately 
long to do a build, and the user tried cancelling, forcing, etc. There's 
3 builders for this worker. 1 doesn't use locks, but the other 2 do. 
It's pretty common for our workers to have a builder that doesn't lock, 
and the rest do.

The current situation is that the build of the builder in question shows 
not 1, but 2 builds building. Sort of, the current build is shown as 
acquiring locks. The older building build is clearly stalled.

The other builder for the worker is proceeding well (but its builds take 
about 3 days). Obviously, it was able to get the lock. But it has 
started another build after finishing the first one. So it appears that 
it got the lock again before the original builder (unless there's 
something else going on).

I also had a different worker's build stall, so I moved that worker to 
our alternate master. Unfortunately, it's a trick that only works once. 
If I move it back, it'll still be stalled. Is there any way to remove a 
no longer active worker from the database? I tried once, but I messed it 
up and had to start with an empty database. I didn't try again.

Neil Gilmore
grammatech.com