Tails

#1 Updated by CyrilBrulebois 2019-12-02 11:10:29

And I’m hitting this again, even with everyone under submodules/ with g+w, and after vm:destroy-ing to make sure I was starting from a clean slate.

#2 Updated by CyrilBrulebois 2019-12-02 11:33:17

Also checked that chmod -R go+rX .git/modules/submodules wouldn’t change anything because those permissions were already there.

Getting rid of the basebox entirely (rake basebox:clean_all) seems to work, but that’s a rather big hammer…

#3 Updated by CyrilBrulebois 2019-12-02 19:10:56

What’s with aufs4-standalone vs. aufs-standalone anyway?

The first build is fine but any subsequent build fails, and I need to start over (going as far as trashing the basebox), which is entirely unreasonable.

kibi@armor:~/work/clients/tails/release/release-checkout$ ls submodules/
aufs-standalone/        chutney/                jenkins-tools/          mirror-pool-dispatcher/ 

kibi@armor:~/work/clients/tails/release/release-checkout$ cat .gitmodules 
[submodule "submodules/jenkins-tools"]
    path = submodules/jenkins-tools
    url = https://git-tails.immerda.ch/jenkins-tools
[submodule "submodules/chutney"]
    path = submodules/chutney
    url = https://git-tails.immerda.ch/chutney
    branch = feature/tails_test_suite
[submodule "submodules/mirror-pool-dispatcher"]
    path = submodules/mirror-pool-dispatcher
    url = https://git-tails.immerda.ch/mirror-pool-dispatcher
[submodule "submodules/aufs-standalone"]
    path = submodules/aufs-standalone
    url = https://github.com/sfjro/aufs5-standalone.git

Meanwhile, on the guest VM:

vagrant@vagrant-buster:/amnesia.git/.git/modules/submodules$ ls -l
total 20
drwxr-xr-x 8 vagrant vagrant 4096 Sep  7 22:23 aufs4-standalone
drwxr-xr-x 8 vagrant vagrant 4096 Dec  2 18:56 chutney
drwxr-xr-x 8 vagrant vagrant 4096 Dec  2 18:56 jenkins-tools
drwxr-xr-x 8 vagrant vagrant 4096 Dec  2 18:56 mirror-pool-dispatcher
drwxr-xr-x 8 vagrant vagrant 4096 Dec  2 09:33 pythonlib

#4 Updated by CyrilBrulebois 2019-12-02 19:25:43

It seems getting rid of all the contents of .git/modules, then running:

git submodule deinit -f .
git submodule init
git submodule update

did the trick, and I’m no longer seeing aufs4-standalone, but aufs-standalone instead.

Absolutely no idea why the first build succeeds but not the second/n-th ones… But we might need to have some kind of self-healing process following commit:7a4dc47c5d2e5aa57e83ddfa40cbf5964cf691cb which renamed aufs4-standalone into aufs-standalone.

Maybe this depends on the git version on the host, which might explain why some developers didn’t get this issue (I’m still running stretch, because ENOTIME to upgrade, plus running the test suite without the VM indirection seemed a good reason not to rush anything).

#5 Updated by CyrilBrulebois 2019-12-08 00:24:57

In another checkout, this seemed to work:

rm .git/modules/submodules/aufs4-standalone/ -rf
git submodule init
git submodule update

#7 Updated by intrigeri 2019-12-15 08:34:29

I’m very sorry the renaming of aufs4-standalone to aufs-standalone causes trouble. Previous aufsN → aufsN+1 renaming caused trouble already, which is why I wanted to do one last renaming and avoid the problem happening again.

I remember this has caused trouble for other people too. I think most developers had to do $something to cope with this renaming since September. I should have provided instructions to do so. By now, I expect all active developers have gone through this transition already and the bulk of the pain is behind us. So it might be too late now to figure out how to document a transition that actually happened in practice?

On the workaround front I can suggest:

• If you don’t do this consistently already: ensure you run git submodule update --init when switching between branches that have different sets of submodules. But I think it is not sufficient to address corner cases such as this one.
• Sometimes I need to rake vm:ssh and then rm -rf amnesia.git, to workaround weird build failures (the build system does not see the branch I’m trying to build). I’ve still not taken time to report this, mostly because I am presently unable to describe what are the conditions for this problem to happen. Regardless, I suspect it could have solved the problem you’ve faced.