Re: t5539 fails on ubuntu for v2.0.0-rc2

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: May 14, 2014, 19:33 UTC
Message-ID: <20140514193353.GB2715@sigill.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <xmqqiop8l1zk.fsf@gitster.dls.corp.google.com>

On Wed, May 14, 2014 at 10:11:11AM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:

Show 9 quoted lines

> A bit more disturbing is that I did not get the impression that we
> know the exact reason why these http tests, especially the getwpuid
> call, fail for Fabio when run as root.  And if my impression is
> correct, then "do not run tests as root" applied as a "solution" to
> the failure report, would merely be sweeping the problem under the
> rug, even though it is a very good advice in general.
> 
> Is it a bug in the server itself that it fails to do getpwuid, or is
> it because the system Fabio's on is somehow screwed up?

I think it's a config problem possibly coupled with an Apache bug. We don't define the "User" directive (and I think it would be kind of crazy to do so[1]). The default for "User" is "-1", and we see in his log that apache was trying to getpwuid to 4294967295. However, if you don't set User at all, and you are running as root, I would expect Apache to continue running as root. The most I could come up with on this front was that it's a bug in apache 1.3.22:

  http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/apache/users/179688#179688

but that seems like an awfully old version to have on a Natty desktop (I checked, and it seems only to have shipped apache2). So either the bug resurfaced, or something else is going on.

Show 5 quoted lines

> Until the latter can be ruled out, we might be better off not doing
> anything, which may give interested parties an easier way to dig
> deeper into the real cause of getpwuid failing, no?  Such a digging
> may even result in a better solution (e.g. finding a specific
> pattern of misconfigured systems and stop tests only on them).

Sure, I have no problem with anybody digging deeper. I was mainly worried that it would become a pain for people on such systems, as it causes a false positive in the test suite. But we don't even know how common such systems are, so I'm OK with waiting to see if we have more reports.

-Peff