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Alistair Buxton
Asked: 2013-11-01 17:43:00 +0800 CST

How to debug a build failure which cannot be reproduced outside of a Launchpad build environment?

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I am attempting to build a modified libdbusmenu package. It builds correctly if I build it locally:

sudo apt-get build-dep libdbusmenu
wget https://launchpad.net/~a-j-buxton/+archive/dbusmenu/+files/libdbusmenu_12.10.3%2B13.10.20130913-0ubuntu2.1.diff.gz
wget https://launchpad.net/~a-j-buxton/+archive/dbusmenu/+files/libdbusmenu_12.10.3%2B13.10.20130913-0ubuntu2.1.dsc
wget https://launchpad.net/~a-j-buxton/+archive/dbusmenu/+files/libdbusmenu_12.10.3%2B13.10.20130913.orig.tar.gz
dpkg-source -x libdbusmenu*.dsc
cd libdbusmenu*
dpkg-buildpackage

However, in a PPA, one of the tests fails to run which causes the build to fail. The actual test output is not written to the buildlog:

https://launchpadlibrarian.net/155471644/buildlog_ubuntu-saucy-amd64.libdbusmenu_12.10.3%2B13.10.20130913-0ubuntu2.1_FAILEDTOBUILD.txt.gz

How can I solve this issue?

It might come down to more closely reproducing the build environment used by the PPA builders. If so, how do I do that?

I have tried building using a pbuilder chroot - this works correctly on my local system.

Lintian produces the following warnings on the package:

W: libdbusmenu source: quilt-build-dep-but-no-series-file
W: libdbusmenu source: patch-system-but-no-source-readme
W: libdbusmenu source: ancient-standards-version 3.9.2 (current is 3.9.4)
ppa

1 Answers

  1. In looking through the log there are some warnings, that you probably should look at, particularly if you don't get them on the local machine, but I think the big hint about what is going on is the name of the failed test: glib-events.

    events are almost always related to I/O, so to try to force the error on the local machine unset XAUTHORITY and DISPLAY, close standard input or redirect it to /dev/null and redirect standard out and error to a file. nohup will do the redirection for you, but wont touch the environment, or you could use at or batch instead of nohup which also offer the advantage of changing the session leader.

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