The beaker-sync-tasks utility currently downloads files directly into the main Beaker RPMs directory, bypassing the file lock normally used to protect changes to the task library. Instead, downloads should be transferred to a staging area and the copied over to the main directory using TaskLibrary.update_task(). (This is already called, but using it on a file that is already in that directory means it doesn't properly synchronise with the harness repo creation process) This can be verified based on automated tests and code review - no need to contrive a complicated manual test scenario.
Just so that I'm clear about this, at least one of the problems is the following(?): TaskA is uploaded TaskB is uploaded TaskB gets flock and updates repo (with TaskB and TaskA) TaskA fails for unknown reason and is rolled back # Except that the repo has already been updated with TaskA! Are there any problems with passing '--includepkg' to createrepo to make sure that each Task upload is only updating the repo for that particular task?
No, task upload is fine (that was a previous bug, though). The problem is that the background sync task is dumping random crap in the task library directory without holding the flock and it's having weird side effects, since the repo management assumes that nothing will be added to the directory without holding the flock first.
If you're worried about testing for this, I wouldn't worry - just fix it, and make sure it's holding the flock whenever it is modifying the task library. Since syncs may be rather large, I also suggest it may be appropriate to do the library updates in batches of 100 or so tasks rather than waiting until everything has been downloaded.
http://gerrit.beaker-project.org/#/c/2578/
Release announcement: https://lists.fedorahosted.org/pipermail/beaker-devel/2013-December/000923.html