Re: Docs Build in CI failing with "failed to load external entity"

Hi,

On 2024-10-25 08:22:42 +0300, Thomas Munro wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 25, 2024 at 4:44 AM Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
> > Melanie Plageman <melanieplageman(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
> > > I know in the past docs builds failing with "failed to load external
> > > entity" have happened on macos. But, recently I've noticed this
> > > failure for docs build on CI (not on macos) -- docs build is one of
> > > the jobs run under the "Compiler Warnings" task.
> >
> > It looks to me like a broken docbook installation on (one of?)
> > the CI machines. Note that the *first* complaint is
> >
> > [19:23:20.590] file:///etc/xml/catalog:1: parser error : Document is empty
>
> Yeah. That CI job runs on a canned Debian image that is rebuilt and
> republished every couple of days to make sure it's using up to date
> packages and kernel etc. Perhaps the package installation silently
> corrupted /etc/xml/catalog, given that multiple packages probably mess
> with it, though I don't have a specific theory for how that could
> happen, given that package installation seems to be serial... The
> installation log doesn't seem to show anything suspicious.

Yea, it's clearly corrupted - the file is empty. I don't understand how that
can happen, particularly without any visible error. I certainly can't
reproduce it when installing the packages exactly the same way it happens for
the image.

I also don't think this happened before, despite the recipe for building the
images not having meaningfully changed in quite a while. So it must be some
rare edge case.

> I wonder if this will magically fix itself when the next CI image
> build cron job kicks off. I have no idea what time zone this page is
> showing but it should happen in another day or so, unless Andres is
> around to kick it sooner:
>
> https://cirrus-ci.com/github/anarazel/pg-vm-images

I did trigger a rebuild of the image just now. Hopefully that'll fix it.

Greetings,

Andres Freund