Buildbot failures due to checkout

[Mark Wielaard]

Hi Richard,

On Thu, 2022-08-25 at 11:13 +0100, Richard Earnshaw via Binutils wrote:
> It seems that the buildbot is failing regularly due to git checkouts not 
> succeeding.  I'm guessing this is because it's using anonymous git 
> access and therefore being throttled due to server load.  But it's 
> leading to a lot of additional 'spam' on the mailing list.
> 
> Is there anything that can be done about this?  Either by nobbling the 
> bot to not whinge in this case or by giving the bot more priority on the 
> server so that it doesn't get throttled so often.

Yeah, my apologies. It is a TODO item:
https://sourceware.org/git/?p=builder.git;a=blob;f=TODO;hb=HEAD

- Git retry step is broken. Looking at the code it only works for
  incremental updates, not for mode='full', method='fresh' which we
  are using. Given we often already use srcdir != builddir we might
  just use incremental mode. Or we could fix the code?

I see there was just the following commit upstream:
git: Do not throw on intial _fetch() failure if retry or clobber
requested
https://github.com/buildbot/buildbot/commit/b2cad8d2840a74455366ddc1db0bcf4fd199125c

Maybe that would fix it. I'll see if I can backport that to our release
or hope there will be a new upstream release soon to upgrade to.

Frank, could we add the worker IPs to some allow list on sourceware?
There are 25+ workers now though (hurrah for success!)
https://builder.sourceware.org/buildbot/#/workers

Cheers,

Mark