EWS bots can't understand when they can't update It turns out that if you get your svn checkout wedged (as often happens on windows), then EWS bots can get into a state where they can't update and can't build, but don't report this. The way we do an update is part of the _build call: http://trac.webkit.org/browser/trunk/WebKitTools/Scripts/webkitpy/tool/commands/earlywarningsystem.py#L60 But! we can't distinguish between a failed first build and a failed update. The update will fail, causing the build to fail, and then if the checkout happens to be bad enough that a no-update build fails on it too, then we just assume the tree is hosed and do nothing. The way I've fixed this for the win-ews for now is to add a: svn status | grep ? | awk '{print $2}' | xargs rm step to the wrapper script. (To emulate git clean -f) The right fix is to separate out the update step so we can detect when it goes wrong. I think the commit-queue needs a separate update step too.
This is very similar to bug 46636.