The test had a few shortcomings that made it flaky or simply wrong:
1. We were verifying that hints were written by checking the size of
in-flight hints. However, that could potentially lead to problems
in rare situations.
For instance, if all of the hints failed to be written to disk, the
size of in-flight hints would drop to zero, but creating a sync point
would correspond to the empty state.
In such a situation, we should fail immediately and indicate what
the cause was.
2. A sync point corresponds to the hints that have already been written
to disk. The number of those is tracked by the metric `written`.
It's a much more reliable way to make sure that hints have been
written to the commitlog. That ensures that the sync point we'll
create will really correspond to those hints.
3. The auxiliary function `wait_for` used in the test works like this:
it executes the passed callback and looks at the result. If it's
`None`, it retries it. Otherwise, the callback is deemed to have
finished its execution and no further retries will be attempted.
Before this commit, we simply returned a bool, and so the code was
wrong. We improve it.
Note that this fixesscylladb/scylladb#28203, which was a manifestation
of scylladb/scylladb#25879. We created a sync point that corresponded
to the empty state, and so it immediately resolved, even when node 3
was still dead.
Refs scylladb/scylladb#25879Fixesscylladb/scylladb#28203
a256ba7de0