Source: xmoto Version: 0.6.1+repack-7 Severity: serious X-Debbugs-CC: debian...@lists.debian.org User: debian...@lists.debian.org Usertags: flaky
The superficial autopkgtest for xmoto seems to be failing intermittently, especially on ppc64el (for whatever reason), which is likely to block other packages' migration to testing. In particular, I'm looking at this because of sdl12-compat: xmoto currently uses libsdl1.2debian, which is the legacy SDL 1.2 package (unmaintained upstream), but the long-term plan is for sdl12-compat (a reimplementation of the SDL 1.2 API using SDL 2) to take over the binary package name libsdl1.2debian. It looks as though the test is waiting for an arbitrary 3 seconds for the server to start listening, which is not always going to be enough. It would be better if the test was something like this (using approximately Python syntax here, but only as pseudocode): start_time = time now TIMEOUT = 60 seconds (or some other arbitrary semi-long time) while True: if server process has exited: fail the test if time now > start_time + TIMEOUT: fail the test try: connect to socket except ECONNREFUSED: sleep(1) except any other error: fail the test else: break out of this loop continue with the test Or, as a stopgap, an alternative would be to mark the test as flaky (which means its result will be ignored) and reduce the severity of this bug report to non-RC. Thanks, smcv