patch for function arg/return types in frontier_client.py

[missirol]

Patch resulted from the debugging done in cms-sw/cmssw#33945 (mostly carried out by others before me).

Aims to solve failure of some unit tests in ASAN IBs of CMSSW (see cms-sw/cmssw#33945 for further details).

Opening this PR to test the patch, as suggested by @smuzaffar.

[cmsbuild]

A new Pull Request was created by @missirol (Marino Missiroli) for branch cms/2.9.1.

@cmsbuild, @smuzaffar, @iarspider can you please review it and eventually sign? Thanks.
@perrotta, @dpiparo, @qliphy you are the release manager for this.
cms-bot commands are listed here

[missirol]

@smuzaffar

If possible, it might be useful to test first only the package CondTools/HLT, because for that one there is only 1 unit test that fails in ASAN IBs, and that one should be fixed by this patch. Most other packages also contain other unrelated unit-test failures that this patch does not fix (so the tests would likely fail anyways). In general, if the patch works, there should be no mention of frontier_getRawData in the unit-test logs.

[smuzaffar]

test parameters:

• addpkg = CondTools, CondCore/Utilities, CommonTools/Utils, Alignment

[smuzaffar]

please test
lets test the change for normal IBs

[smuzaffar]

please test for CMSSW_12_3_ASAN_X

[smuzaffar]

@DrDaveD this patch seems to fix frontier client errors for CMSSW ASAN builds. Can you please review these and if looks good then can you please include this in next frontier_client release?

[cmsbuild]

+1

Summary: https://cmssdt.cern.ch/SDT/jenkins-artifacts/pull-request-integration/PR-ea8c6a/21603/summary.html
COMMIT: 5d9b652
CMSSW: CMSSW_12_3_X_2022-01-10-1100/slc7_amd64_gcc10
User test area: For local testing, you can use /cvmfs/cms-ci.cern.ch/week1/cms-externals/frontier_client/2/21603/install.sh to create a dev area with all the needed externals and cmssw changes.

Comparison Summary

Summary:

• No significant changes to the logs found
• Reco comparison results: 4 differences found in the comparisons
• DQMHistoTests: Total files compared: 43
• DQMHistoTests: Total histograms compared: 3461659
• DQMHistoTests: Total failures: 5
• DQMHistoTests: Total nulls: 1
• DQMHistoTests: Total successes: 3461631
• DQMHistoTests: Total skipped: 22
• DQMHistoTests: Total Missing objects: 0
• DQMHistoSizes: Histogram memory added: -0.004 KiB( 42 files compared)
• DQMHistoSizes: changed ( 312.0 ): -0.004 KiB MessageLogger/Warnings
• Checked 181 log files, 42 edm output root files, 43 DQM output files
• TriggerResults: no differences found

[cmsbuild]

-1

Failed Tests: UnitTests
Summary: https://cmssdt.cern.ch/SDT/jenkins-artifacts/pull-request-integration/PR-ea8c6a/21611/summary.html
COMMIT: 5d9b652
CMSSW: CMSSW_12_3_ASAN_X_2022-01-07-2300/slc7_amd64_gcc11
User test area: For local testing, you can use /cvmfs/cms-ci.cern.ch/week0/cms-externals/frontier_client/2/21611/install.sh to create a dev area with all the needed externals and cmssw changes.

The following merge commits were also included on top of IB + this PR after doing git cms-merge-topic:

• @cms-sw Update lxml to verion 4.6.5 cms-sw/cmsdist#7535
• @belforte test latest crab client (no asourl/db) cms-sw/cmsdist#7536
• @cms-sw Drop py-theanets and py-climate cms-sw/cmsdist#7518

You can see more details here:
https://cmssdt.cern.ch/SDT/jenkins-artifacts/pull-request-integration/PR-ea8c6a/21611/git-recent-commits.json
https://cmssdt.cern.ch/SDT/jenkins-artifacts/pull-request-integration/PR-ea8c6a/21611/git-merge-result

Unit Tests

I found errors in the following unit tests:

---> test ExpressionEvaluatorUnitTest had ERRORS
---> test testExpressionEvaluator had ERRORS
---> test testGetPayloadData had ERRORS
---> test test_conddb had ERRORS
and more ...

Comparison Summary

Summary:

• No significant changes to the logs found
• Reco comparison results: 0 differences found in the comparisons
• Reco comparison had 73 failed jobs
• DQMHistoTests: Total files compared: 43
• DQMHistoTests: Total histograms compared: 3461659
• DQMHistoTests: Total failures: 1066799
• DQMHistoTests: Total nulls: 64
• DQMHistoTests: Total successes: 2394774
• DQMHistoTests: Total skipped: 22
• DQMHistoTests: Total Missing objects: 0
• DQMHistoSizes: Histogram memory added: 3.41 KiB( 42 files compared)
• DQMHistoSizes: changed ( 10224.0 ): -0.117 KiB SiStrip/MechanicalView
• DQMHistoSizes: changed ( 11834.0 ): 3.240 KiB SiStrip/MechanicalView
• DQMHistoSizes: changed ( 250202.181 ): 0.533 KiB SiStrip/MechanicalView
• DQMHistoSizes: changed ( 25202.0 ): -0.246 KiB SiStrip/MechanicalView
• Checked 181 log files, 42 edm output root files, 43 DQM output files

[smuzaffar]

+externals
looks good

[cmsbuild]

This pull request is fully signed and it will be integrated in one of the next cms/2.9.1 IBs (tests are also fine). This pull request will now be reviewed by the release team before it's merged. @perrotta, @dpiparo, @qliphy (and backports should be raised in the release meeting by the corresponding L2)

[DrDaveD]

As I mentioned in cms-sw/cmsdist#7539, there is currently no frontier_client.py in the frontier client distribution, that is a cmssw addition. Other than that the patch looks ok to me. Perhaps it is finally time to move frontier_client.py to the frontier_client external.

[DrDaveD]

I see there was already a fermitools/frontier#37 issue to include the python bindings, as referenced at cms-sw/cmsdist#5898