Murder Mystery: GCC Builds Failing After sbuild Refactoring

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2024-12-14 03:30:03

This is the story of an investigation conducted by Jochen Sprickerhof, Helmut Grohne, and myself. It was true teamwork, and we would have not reached the bottom of the issue working individually. We think you will find it as interesting and fun as we did, so here is a brief writeup. A few of the steps mentioned here took several days, others just a few minutes. What is described as a natural progression of events did not always look very obvious at the moment at all.

The build error happens on the build servers when running the testuite, but we know this cannot happen. GCC builds are not meant to fail in case of testsuite failures! Return codes are not making the build fail, make is begin called with -k, it just cannot happen.

A lot of the GCC tests are always failing in fact, and an extensive log of the results is posted to the debian-gcc mailing list, but the packages always build fine regardless.

Building on my machine running Bookworm is just fine. The Build Daemons run Bookworm and use a Sid chroot for the build environment, just like I am. Same kernel.