Hi Peff,

On Sat, 26 Oct 2019, Jeff King wrote:

On Sat, Oct 26, 2019 at 10:56:45PM +0200, Johannes Schindelin wrote:

quoted

Back to the issue at hand: I did open a GitGitGadget PR with my proposed
change, in the hopes that I could somehow fast-track this fix into the
CI/PR builds over at https://github.com/gitgitgadget/git, but there are
problems: it seems that now there is an at least occasional broken pipe
in the same test when run on macOS.

Yes, I think that's another issue in the same test. There's more
discussion further down in the thread I linked earlier, starting here:

  https://public-inbox.org/git/20190829143805.GB1746@sigill.intra.peff.net/

and I think Gábor's solution here:

  https://public-inbox.org/git/20190830121005.GI8571@szeder.dev/

is the right direction (and note that this _isn't_ just a test artifact,
but a bug that occasionally hits real-world cases, too).

That sounds good! I guess I should continue _that_ thread.

quoted

There _also_ seems to be something spooky going on in t3510.12 and .13,
where the expected output differs from the actual output only by a
re-ordering of the lines:

-- snip --
[...]

+++ diff -u expect advice
--- expect	2019-10-25 22:17:44.982884700 +0000
+++ advice	2019-10-25 22:17:45.278884500 +0000

@@ -1,3 +1,3 @@
 error: cherry-pick is already in progress
-hint: try "git cherry-pick (--continue | --skip | --abort | --quit)"
 fatal: cherry-pick failed
+hint: try "git cherry-pick (--continue | --skip | --abort | --quit)"
-- snap --

Hrm. I'd have thought those are both coming from the same process. Which
implies that we're not fflushing stderr before calling write(2). But
your patch seems to do so...

<scratches head> Aha. I think you force-pushed up as I am typing this.
:) So I think that is indeed the solution.

Yes, sorry, I had this idea and it worked locally, and I wanted to know
whether it would turn the PR build green.

quoted

So much as I would love to see the flakiness of t5516 be fixed as soon
as possible, I fear we will have to look at the underlying issue a bit
closer: there are two processes writing to `stderr` concurrently. I
don't know whether there would be a good way for the `stderr` of the
`upload-pack` process to be consumed by the `fetch` process, and to be
printed by the latter.

The worst part is that this message already _is_ consumed by fetch: we
send it twice, once over the sideband, and once directly to stderr. In
most cases the stderr version is lost, but some server providers might
be collecting it. I wouldn't mind seeing the direct-to-stderr one
dropped. There's some more discussion in (from the same thread linked
earlier):

  https://public-inbox.org/git/20190828145412.GB14432@sigill.intra.peff.net/

It is tricky all right.

Full disclosure: I am mainly interested in having lots less failing
builds (which I all re-run manually when I see that a known-flaky test
failed).

Ciao,
Dscho