Should selftest success depend on verbosity?

[Maritza Mendez]

On Fri, Jun 19, 2009 at 6:44 PM, Andrew Bennetts <
andrew.bennetts at canonical.com> wrote:

> My wild guess would be timing sensitivity, but the complete determinism
> (100%
> reproducible in 10 attempts) suggests not.
>
> Hmm, perhaps it's a garbage collection issue?  Turning on -v will have the
> effect of producing slightly different object allocation/deallocation
> counts,
> which will cause the periodic cyclic garbage collector to kick in at
> slightly
> different points... it's not the first time I've seen an issue like that...
>
> I don't have time to do this right now, but if I were investigating this
> I'd be
> experimenting with adding "import gc; gc.disable()" early in the 'bzr'
> script
> and see how that affects results.
>

Thanks for the suggestion.  I was pretty excited about this, because I
vaguely recall seeing a warning about garbage collection at some point in
the last couple days.  So I  made a copy bzr with import gc; gc.disable()
right at the top, ahead of import os.  I regret to report that I found the
same curious behaviors with bzr-no_gc (my modified copy) as I originally
reported for 'selftest http_test'.

So I did a grep "import gc" *.py in /usr/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/bzrlib
to see if anything else is trivially pulling in gc and trumping gc.disable.
No matches.  I suppose there might be indirect ways to get import gc, but I
have not looked any harder.  A less specific grep for "gc." only turns up
references to groupcompress, which is obviously unrelated to this
discussion.

Anyway, I've only tested test_http without garbage collection.  I am going
to go through my other unusual results and see if garbage collection makes
any difference.

Thanks!
-M
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