Travis: test flickering

[agraul]

There is one test that fails sometimes. Triggering a rerun of travis often gets the test to pass. This happens in many PRs and while this is not news to some of us, I want to have it documented here so everyone can know about it 😃

Quoting Duncan:

We do have one system test that fails intermittently, and I believe it has to do with the way the ActiveXML library assembles queries for substrings when there are - in the string.

You can reproduce it with:

while bundle exec rails test test/system/search_results_test.rb; do :; done

until it fails.

I have spent some time looking and it and it is the only showstopper to enable auto-deploy.

[dmacvicar]

The problem comes from the test that simulates an "nvidia" search.
That test stubs a random result based on packages named like the search term plus some random suffix.

That stub mocks the http call on a search by substring, as we do expect the search to hit https://github.com/openSUSE/software-o-o/blob/master/app/models/seeker.rb#L29

However, sometimes, the search hits https://github.com/openSUSE/software-o-o/blob/master/app/models/seeker.rb#L32 , which happens for terms specified with quotes, which results in a exact match being issued, which is not stubbed by our tests.

The only places where such search happens, is:

• software-o-o/app/helpers/application_helper.rb

  Line 47 in beb9911

  packages = Seeker.prepare_result("\"#{pkgname}\"", nil, nil, nil, nil)

  which is called in a view (:cry: ) and...

• software-o-o/app/controllers/package_controller.rb

  Line 17 in 9c4e7b8

  @packages = Seeker.prepare_result("\"#{@pkgname}\"", nil, nil, nil, nil)

  which seems to be the detail page of a package, which I understand, tries an exact match, once the package was found by keyword.

Giving that the first usage is in the search results (

software-o-o/app/views/search/_find_results.html.erb

Line 49 in beb9911

if( appdata_pkg.blank? || appdata_pkg.first[:summary].blank? )

) I would suspect from this code. It looks for the exact package in oder to get the description to show in the card. I would expect this call to happen all the time.

So a way of fixing it would be to stub the search for every subpackage based on exact match. However, I would still be puzzled on why it happens sometimes.

[dmacvicar]

I have a fix that stubs the missing query, however this code path comes directly from hell.

The code is calling:

GET https://api.opensuse.org/search/published/binary/id?match=@name%20=%20'nvidia-adipisci'%20

And the stub is

stub_request(:get, \"https://api.opensuse.org/search/published/binary/id?match=@name%20=%20'nvidia-adipisci'\")

And here is the culprit of that space:

software-o-o/app/models/seeker.rb

Line 32 in 72ae9d1

xpath_items << "@name = '#{word.gsub(/['"()]/, "")}' "

Which seems to be a totally out of place space, as then the items are joined, not concatenated.