Holger Levsen wrote:
> Anyhow, about my --hard-timeout option idea:
>
> my idea of "--hard-timeout $time" is that diffoscope terminates itself
> after $time, no matter what *and* then re-starts itself with
> "--max-container-depth 3"
Just to say that I am totally on board with the idea of ensuring we
get _something_ out of diffoscope on tests.reproducible-builds.org.
Way better than 250 timeouts.
However, I think this first iteration of --hard-timeout time has a few
things that would need ironing out first, and potentially make it not
worth implementing:
(1) You suggest it should start again with "--max-container-depth 3",
but it would surely need some syntax (or another option?) to control
that "3" (but for the second time only).
(2) In fact, its easy to imagine that one would want to restart with
other restrictions as well: not just --max-container-depth. For
instance, excluding external commands like readelf and objdump that
you know to be slow.
(3) The output might need some comment saying "this was re-run with
restrictions as we hit a timeout".
(4) My gut feel that it would not be all that great to rely on CPython
to really properly clear up child processes after a certain amount of
time. Although I believe the most reliable top-level description to do
this kind of thing inside CPython is to start a watchdog thread that
sleeps until the timeout and then tries to kill everything, but my
experience of doing anything like this within Python itself is not
great, and essentially always needed something at the process level
outside of it for it to be reliable. A container would be even more
effective, I'm sure.
In other words, I think the best way of achieving the result we want
is, alas, by doing it outside of diffoscope at the level of the
Jenkins. As in, exactly what you describe here:
> Else we could also extend the current code for tests.r-b.o/debian,
> which currently
> just kills diffoscope after 2h, to then run diffoscope
> --max-container-depth 3 :)
Is that a massive faff? :/
Best wishes,
--
o
⬋ ⬊ Chris Lamb
o o reproducible-builds.org 💠
⬊ ⬋
o
