Re: Alpha4 release blockers (was Re: wrapping up this CommitFest)

On 02/03/11 01:05, Andrew Dunstan wrote:
>
>
> On 03/01/2011 05:19 PM, Jan Urbański wrote:
>> On 01/03/11 22:07, Andrew Dunstan wrote:
>>>
>>> On 03/01/2011 03:53 PM, Jan Urbański wrote:
>>>> On 01/03/11 21:35, Tom Lane wrote:
>>>>> Josh Berkus<josh(at)agliodbs(dot)com> writes:
>>>>>> I'm ok with closing things as of the end of the 15 days, say
>>>>>> Thursday or
>>>>>> Friday.
>>>>> It might be a good idea to make a list of what we have left to do
>>>>> before
>>>>> we can wrap an alpha. Here are some things on my list. Not all of
>>>>> them
>>>>> are necessarily release blockers, but we need to discuss which ones
>>>>> are:
>>>>>
>>>>> * Regression test failures from recent plpython patches. These are
>>>>> affecting enough machines to make them "must fix before alpha", IMO.
>>>>> There are some variations in error message wording, which are not too
>>>>> terrible but also not exactly hard to fix. The python assert failure
>>>>> that some Fedora machines are reporting is considerably more
>>>>> disturbing.
>>> I agree.
>>>
>>>> I'm looking into the crash, no luck so long.
>>>>
>>>>
>>> Is there anything you need that would help you?
>> Could you try this patch and see if it fixes the failures?
>>
>> I'm at a loss as to why this happens, but judging from the traceback the
>> spiexceptions module is getting unreffed somewhere and when garbage
>> collection kicks it it barfs on an object with refcount 0. So I'm
>> forcing an incref of the module to confirm that.
>>
>> I tried various tricks on 32 bit Debian, with Python 2.6, 2.7, Python
>> compiled from Fedora's SRPM and I never saw anything wrong. Will keep on
>> trying, but tommorrow evening, time to sleep :(
>
> Thanks.
>
> That seems to have fixed it, so I have applied the patch. Would you like
> to supply some comments to got with it?

The comment would be something like

/* XXX it appears that in some circumstantes the reference count of the
spiexceptions module drops to zero causing a Python assert failure when
the garbage collector visits the module. This has been observed on the
buildfarm. To fix this, add an additional ref for the module here. */

I have no idea why the refcount of the module becomes zero, debug prints
I added on my system were always showing 1.

Jan