Re: python configure.py never exiting when building firefox

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

On 17/06/2019 19:59, David Brownlee wrote:
> Something like 50% of the time when I try to build firefox I end up with 
> a python process that never ends. From memory this also happens almost 
> every time I try to build thunderbird, but... I don't often try to build 
> thunderbird :)


> Is anyone else seeing this?

Used to see it occasionally (but nothing like the 50% level) quite a lot 
on older 8.0 stable systems doing builds under jenkins. It started 
behaving better when I put a wrapper around the builds that ran things 
in a PTY. The problem also seemed to be sensitive to how much data was 
backed up in the output pipe. Even with the pty if I didn't keep the 
pipe drained by flushing the stdout of the wrapper it seemed to behave 
badly.

Was more prevalent with thunderbird than firefox but I have seen it on both.

I've also seen gmake blow up with errors on stdout/stderr at process 
exit causing the build to fail (also in firefox/thunderbird) but again 
haven't seen that since I switched to the wrapper approach either.

Also with MAKE_JOBS set to 8.

Mike