mpi and reprotest as root

Hello, I am working on a software which use mpirun and the reprotest failed with this error message

https://salsa.debian.org/picca/bitshuffle/-/jobs/746388

so it seems that mpi does not like be run as root. There is a way to fix this on the comman dline, but I think that this is wrong and the real problem is to run reprotest as root.

cheers

changed title from mpi an reprotest to mpi and reprotest as root

Hi @picca ,

I should check if reprotest allows building as user somehow. It's not possible to run reprotest as user because most of the variations it does need root permissions.

I don't know much about policies so I'm not sure if this is something recommended or not, but you wouldn't have this problem if you disable the tests on build time and add them as autopkgtest. From the logs I understand that the problems are when running override_dh_auto_test, which could be easily done in autopkgtest (which doesn't run as root).

Iñaki Malerba gitlab@salsa.debian.org writes:

understand that the problems are when running override_dh_auto_test, which could be easily done in autopkgtest (which doesn't run as root).

What is strange is that during the initial build it works but not during the reprotest build.

That's because the initial build is done as user.

https://salsa.debian.org/salsa-ci-team/pipeline/-/blob/master/images/scripts/docker-build.sh#L71

Iñaki Malerba gitlab@salsa.debian.org writes:

If you look here, there is results, so it seems that reproducible tatet on the CI are not equivalent to the one produce on the archive.

https://tests.reproducible-builds.org/debian/rb-pkg/unstable/amd64/diffoscope-results/bitshuffle.html

do you know what is different ?

Yeah, sadly there's a big difference between what reproducible-builds does and reprotest :( .

We've talked with them a few times and they're not using reprotest, but a set of custom scripts. We need to work on that :/

Sorry I cannot provide better answers.

I am having the same issue on some of my packages. One could workaround this failure by setting the variables OMPI_ALLOW_RUN_AS_ROOT=1 and OMPI_ALLOW_RUN_AS_ROOT_CONFIRM=1. Would that be possible just for reprotest or is the only way to set in in debian/rules? I would not want to do the latter.

For us the problem occurs only when we run the tests. I don't think that running tests of a project is needed to test reproducibility (at least it would be better to test reroproducibility without running tests than not testing it at aöö). Hence a solution would be to allow a project to set some variables for reprotest, then we could skip running the tests. This would also save some time for the test.

Or maybe reprotest could set a variable that helps debian/rules to detect that it is run during reprotest and act accordingly.

mentioned in commit ruby-team/ruby-rack@0fb9955f