Files unexpectedly removed from workspace

[Dawn Harris]

Hi,

We're having issues with files disappearing from the workspace area of
some of our build slaves. We think that something might be deleting
files over a certain age (maybe 2 weeks?).

We do not generally delete the whole workspace before each build, so
some files could potentially not have been modified for some time.

For files from SVN, we seem to be losing the source files themselves
and their entries in the ".svn/test-base" directories.

For files from CVS, I think we are losing some files in the "CVS"
directories ("Repository" and "Root") but not the source files
themselves.

Has anyone else seen a similar problem? We wondered if the
"WorkspaceCleanupThread" could be the problem, but we believe that
would delete the whole workspace, not just a few files?

We're using Jenkins version 1.425, with our own SCM plugin. We've
seen the issue on linux and Mac build slaves.

Many thanks,

Dawn

[Ferenc Kovacs]

On Tue, Dec 20, 2011 at 4:18 PM, Dawn Harris <dawn...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi,

We're having issues with files disappearing from the workspace area of
some of our build slaves.  We think that something might be deleting
files over a certain age (maybe 2 weeks?).

hi,

do you happen to be using matrix jobs?

maybe related to  https://issues.jenkins-ci.org/browse/JENKINS-11993  ? (albeit that would only cause problems if you set an aggressive checkout policy).

you are right that Jenkins can automatically wipe your workspace, but AFAIR that would only happen if you are really low on diskspace, and it would wipe the whole thing, not just parts of it. 

--
Ferenc Kovács
@Tyr43l - http://tyrael.hu

[Dawn Harris]

Thanks for the suggestion. We are using matrix jobs.

However our SCM plugin has not done any cleaning of the workspace
before the build starts, so it is quite puzzling!

Many thanks,

Dawn

On Dec 20, 3:32 pm, Ferenc Kovacs <tyr...@gmail.com> wrote:

[danny staple]

Are you using concurrent builds?
I'd generally be careful creating any dependancy on workspace content
from a previous build, and say that if anything must be preserved
(other than possible optimisations with a partial update/incremental
build) then it should probably be archived as an artifact.

Danny

--
Danny Staple

Director, ODM Solutions Ltd
w: http://www.odmsolutions.co.uk
Blog: http://orionrobots.co.uk/blog1-Danny-Staple

[Dawn Harris]

Thanks for the response, but I don't believe we are using concurrent
builds. We are using matrix projects, which are set up with one or
more build slave nodes where the job needs to be run. Each build
slave only has 1 executor too.

I may have confused things slightly by my use of the word "build". We
are not depending on any content from a previous build as such, but we
are trying to do incremental builds. The process fails at the
"update" of the source code stage because it discovers that some
essential SVN/CVS files are missing. Somehow, between the last
successful run of the job on the machine and this run, some files have
disappeared from the workspace.

If the job has multiple build slaves, the problem does not necessarily
appear on all slaves too. The workspace of just one of them may have
been affected.


Many thanks,

Dawn

On Dec 20, 8:56 pm, danny staple <da...@orionrobots.co.uk> wrote:
> Are you using concurrent builds?
> I'd generally be careful creating any dependancy on workspace content
> from a previous build, and say that if anything must be preserved
> (other than possible optimisations with a partial update/incremental
> build) then it should probably be archived as an artifact.
>
> Danny
>