/etc/localtime is not a symlink on koji?

[Elliott Sales de Andrade]

Hi,
I'm debugging an issue in  a FTBFS, which appears caused by unexpected
warnings during a build [1]. These warnings come from R and complain
that /etc/localtime is not a symlink.

According to `man 5 localtime` [2], /etc/localtime cannot be a normal
file or hard link.
Is this something wrong in koji, or its builders?

[1] https://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/taskinfo?taskID=50987042
[2] https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/localtime.html
-- 
Elliott

[Petr Pisar]

On Tue, Sep 08, 2020 at 04:00:14AM -0400, Elliott Sales de Andrade wrote:
>  I'm debugging an issue in  a FTBFS, which appears caused by
> unexpected
>  warnings during a build [1]. These warnings come from R and complain
>  that /etc/localtime is not a symlink.
>  
>  According to `man 5 localtime` [2], /etc/localtime cannot be a normal
>  file or hard link.
>  Is this something wrong in koji, or its builders?
>  
>  [1] https://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/taskinfo?taskID=50987042
>  [2] https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/localtime.html 
I hit this issue many years ago and tzdata maintainer claimed
<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1136219> that it was a fault
of a mock tool. (Mock tool is used when building a package in Koji). I asked
a maintainer of mock to fix it
<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1136040> and he "fixed" it by
not
creating /etc/localtime at all. In the mean time I implemented a work around
in one of mine affected packages and has not seen any issue like that. (Except
of a user who complained that the Fedora package survives longer before
reporting an error than an upstream's code.)

What's your issue now? Is /etc/localtime a normal file again, or is the error
message wrong and the file is missing completely?

-- Petr

[Elliott Sales de Andrade]

On Tue, 8 Sep 2020 at 04:52, Petr Pisar <ppisar(a)redhat.com&gt; wrote:
>  On Tue, Sep 08, 2020 at 04:00:14AM -0400, Elliott Sales de Andrade wrote:
>  > I'm debugging an issue in  a FTBFS, which appears caused by unexpected
>  > warnings during a build [1]. These warnings come from R and complain
>  > that /etc/localtime is not a symlink.
>  >
>  > According to `man 5 localtime` [2], /etc/localtime cannot be a normal
>  > file or hard link.
>  > Is this something wrong in koji, or its builders?
>  >
>  > [1] https://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/taskinfo?taskID=50987042
>  > [2] https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/localtime.html
>
>  I hit this issue many years ago and tzdata maintainer claimed
>  <https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1136219> that it was a fault
>  of a mock tool. (Mock tool is used when building a package in Koji). I asked
>  a maintainer of mock to fix it
>  <https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1136040> and he "fixed" it
> by not
>  creating /etc/localtime at all. In the mean time I implemented a work around
>  in one of mine affected packages and has not seen any issue like that. (Except
>  of a user who complained that the Fedora package survives longer before
>  reporting an error than an upstream's code.)
>
>  What's your issue now? Is /etc/localtime a normal file again, or is the error
>  message wrong and the file is missing completely? 
I debugged it a little with ls -l/cat /etc/localtime, and it
definitely exists, but is a regular file. Confusingly, this only
causes a problem on koji, not in local mock, even though manually
running similar code as the test appears to trigger the same warning
as on koji.

Looking at the R source code for Sys.timezone(), I've found that it
checks the TZ envvar before timedatectl & /etc/localtime, so setting
TZ works around the problem for me (and also silences timedatectl's
warnings.)

Since I have a workaround now and it doesn't reproduce on local mock,
I won't bother spamming koji with debug attempts.

>  -- Petr 
-- 
Elliott

[Miroslav Suchý]

Dne 08. 09. 20 v 10:51 Petr Pisar napsal(a):
> > I'm debugging an issue in  a FTBFS, which appears caused by
> unexpected
> > warnings during a build [1]. These warnings come from R and complain
> > that /etc/localtime is not a symlink.
>  I hit this issue many years ago and tzdata maintainer claimed
>  <https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1136219> that it was a fault
>  of a mock tool. (Mock tool is used when building a package in Koji). I asked
>  a maintainer of mock to fix it
>  <https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1136040> and he "fixed" it
> by not 
The problem does not exists in default Mock installation because it use --isolation=nspawn
and systemd-nspawn takes care
of creating /etc/localtime (as symlink to /usr/share/zoneinfo/*)

When you run Mock with --isolation=simple - this is what Koji does - then you can
reproduce it.
The problem is that the file /etc/localtime is - on normal system - handled by systemd.
And systemd is not present in
default chroot.

I created
  https://github.com/rpm-software-management/mock/pull/625
hopefully it should fix this issue.


-- 
Miroslav Suchy, RHCA
Red Hat, Associate Manager ABRT/Copr, #brno, #fedora-buildsys