Windows buildbots failing due to "hard kill repl test""

[musm]

I've seen this error now in two of my PRs
e.g.: https://build.julialang.org/#/builders/32/builds/5930/steps/2/logs/stdio

Error in testset REPL:
Error During Test at D:\buildbot\worker-tabularasa\tester_win64\build\share\julia\test\testdefs.jl:22
  Got exception outside of a @test
  LoadError: LoadError: "hard kill repl test"

[vtjnash]

It feels like it started about 3 days ago with https://build.julialang.org/#/builders/65/builds/5581 / https://build.julialang.org/#/builders/32/builds/5890 and is now affecting many builds?

Seeing as how that is a build of a PR (#33770) that changed the line of code being tested here, it seems perhaps related.

[musm]

@rfourquet maybe you have some ideas why we are seeing this ?

[rfourquet]

I have no idea but will have a look...

[rfourquet]

I stil don't understand the error (I don't know where the "hard kill repl test" comes from), but I would be surprised if the problem comes from #33770: all the tests were passing in this PR before merging, and as an experiment, I reverted it in #33805 (on top of an unrelated PR), and there the tests still don't pass (and not only on windows by the way, e.g. https://build.julialang.org/#/builders/22/builds/6746).

[musm]

Thanks for taking a look.
https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/blob/master/stdlib/REPL/test/repl.jl#L20
https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/blob/master/stdlib/REPL/test/repl.jl#L32
it looks like a 'kill_timer" issue in one of the tests calling the function

[musm]

I'm not seeing this anymore