Re: error writing to stdout

[Mike Pumford <mpumford%mudcovered.org.uk@localhost>]

On 12/12/2018 20:25, Mike Pumford wrote:
> Not sure if this is a netbsd issue or a pkgsrc issue.
>
> I'm seeing this increasingly as a failure when doing pkgsrc builds. 
> Universally it seems to be thunderbird and firefox that blow up. gmake 
> may be implicated.
>
> This is from a failing firefox build.
>
> gmake[4]: Leaving directory 
> '/pkg_comp/obj/pkgsrc/www/firefox/default/build/config/makefiles/xpidl'
> gmake[4]: write error: stdout
> gmake[3]: *** [Makefile:15: export] Error 1
>
> stdout in this case is a pipe but unless the receiving program crashes 
> which it hasn't as it grabbed that data and wrote it to a file.
> So do we have an error code leaking out that shouldn't be or has gmake 
> got a bug. Only time I've seen stdout return errors in programs is if 
> I've done something daft like make the file handle non-blocking which 
> tends to cause trouble.
Following up on this I'm going to re-run the same build but this time 
without the output going straight to stdout as I have a suspicion that 
pipe output is stalling sometimes. I have seen other stalls when using 
pipes so this just contributes to the suspicion.

In this build run 3 builds failed:
thunderbird & firefox both blew up with the write error: stdout
The other failed build was spamassassin which uses BSD make.

The reason I think its a pipe issue is that the log parser program's 
captured output for spam-assassin has:
nstalling /pkg_===> Cleaning for cwrappers-20180325
===> Cleaning for digest-20180917
===> Cleaning for checkperms-1.12
===> Cleaning for gmake-4.2.1nb1
===> Cleaning for re2c-1.1.1
Which shows a clear cut collapse of stdout/stderr during the make 
install phase.

While it will be irritating if this is a pipe issue as I normally run my 
builds under jenkins (where pipe output is the norm). It is at least 
something I can work around until the cause is found.

Mike