On Mon, Aug 09, 2010 at 08:57:31PM +0000, Martin v. Löwis wrote:
> I still fail to see the bug - it's by design that later build steps are
> not executed if earlier build steps failed. It would be possible to let
> the slaves start over with an entirely new checkout on every build, but
> that would significantly increase bandwidth consumption, and delay
> builds.

I guess, you missed what we are trying to convey.

In the configure script there is this piece of code:

echo "creating Modules/Setup"
if test ! -f Modules/Setup
then
        cp $srcdir/Modules/Setup.dist Modules/Setup
fi      

And only in make clean, is the older Modules/Setup is removed!
So, in effect, if make clean is not run, any changes made in Modules/Setup.dist
will not get into the build process.

This caused a problem because, a change in the re module caused a circular
dependency and lead to compile error. This was fixed by some changes in
Setup.dist, by making a module build statically, now as make clean was not run
by the buildbot, this change is not coming into effect.

Running of make clean in the buildbot context seems to me like having a finally
clause. It is really helpful to cleanup and should always be run.

- Always copying Modules/Setup.dist to Modules/Setup may not be desirable a
fix. It might limit what Setup it is intended for, namely experimentation.