[Pkg-utopia-maintainers] Bug#876743: flatpak: FTBFS on hppa: Creating new namespace failed: Invalid argument

[Simon McVittie]

Control: retitle 876743 flatpak: FTBFS on hppa: Creating new namespace failed: Invalid argument

On Mon, 25 Sep 2017 at 09:40:39 -0400, Aaron M. Ucko wrote:
> Source: flatpak
> Version: 0.9.12-2
> Severity: important
> Tags: upstream
> Justification: fails to build from source (but built successfully in the past)
> 
> The flatpak build for hppa (admittedly not a release architecture) has
> started failing:
> 
>   ERROR: tests/test-run.sh - too few tests run (expected 12, got 0)

Unfortunately this part of the log is relatively useless. As with all recent
Automake packages, please scroll down to just after the summary

# TOTAL: 57
# PASS:  35
# SKIP:  12
# XFAIL: 0
# FAIL:  0
# XPASS: 0
# ERROR: 10

where you will see full logs quoted for the skipped and failing tests,
with underlined headers like

ERROR: tests/test-run.sh
========================

followed by logged output. Unfortunately, because stdout and stderr have
different levels of buffering, the logged output is not particularly
easy to read in this case :-(

I think the real error might be this:

> ++ bwrap --ro-bind / / /bin/true
> (no error here)
... but then later
> Creating new namespace failed: Invalid argument

This indicates that, unlike most Debian buildds, your hppa buildd allows
enough namespace creation that bwrap (bubblewrap) can work at all; but
then it does not allow enough namespace creation that Flatpak's more
complicated uses of bwrap also work.

This probably means the upstream test suite should have a better check for
whether bwrap works, so that these tests can be skipped on your buildd's
kernel (they can't pass there, and Flatpak won't work on that kernel).

Do hppa machines have recent enough kernels available that Flatpak is
of any practical use, for example able to install and run GNOME Recipes
from https://flathub.org/apps.html on a test machine? The jessie kernel
should work. If a recent enough kernel is available, please run it on
hppa buildds. If not, then IMO it's a positive thing that Flatpak FTBFS
on hppa, and the old (non-functional) binaries should probably be removed.

Regards,
    smcv