Bug 616614 – [sihnon] Ebuild failures occuring in global scope

• Product: Gentoo Linux
• Status: RESOLVED FIXED

[Description Michał Górny 2017-04-25 18:43:36 UTC]

Our automated repository checks [1] have detected that the 'sihnon'
repository contains ebuilds that trigger fatal errors during the cache
regeneration. This usually means that the ebuilds call 'die' in global
scope indicating serious issues.

Global-scope failures prevent the ebuild not only from being installed
but also from being properly processed by the Package Manager. Since
metadata can not be obtained for those ebuilds, no cache entries are
created for them and the Package Manager needs to retry running them
every time it stumbles upon them. This involves both a serious slowdown
and repeating error output while performing dependency resolution.

The most common cause of global-scope failures is use of removed or
banned APIs in old ebuilds. In particular, this includes eclasses being
removed or removing support for old EAPIs. Nonetheless there are also
other issues such as performing illegal operations in global scope
(external program calls), malformed bash in ebuilds or malformed
metadata.xml.

The error log for the repository can be found at:

  https://qa-reports.gentoo.org/output/repos/sihnon.html

In particular, please look for highlighted '!!! ERROR' and '!!! caught
exception' lines. The former usually mean failures coming from eclasses
and the ebuild itself, while exceptions usually mean malformed ebuilds
or metadata.xml.

While at it, please consider fixing global-scope 'use' call warnings (if
any). They are not fatal but are considered a serious QA violation.
'use' functions must not ever be called outside of phase functions.

Please fix the issue ASAP, possibly via removing unmaintained, old
ebuilds. We reserve the right to remove the repository from our list if
we do not receive any reply within 4 weeks.

[1]:https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:Repository_mirror_and_CI

[Comment 1 optiz0r 2017-04-25 22:57:01 UTC]

I can't reproduce this, and it doesn't look like a genuine error to me. Transient problem during QA check?

serenity ~ # layman -a sihnon

 * Adding overlay...
 * Overlay "sihnon" is not official. Continue installing? [y/n]: y
 * Running Git... # ( cd /var/lib/layman  && /usr/bin/git clone https://github.com/optiz0r/gentoo-overlay.git /var/lib/layman/sihnon )
Cloning into '/var/lib/layman/sihnon'...
remote: Counting objects: 1165, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (8/8), done.
remote: Total 1165 (delta 1), reused 0 (delta 0), pack-reused 1155
Receiving objects: 100% (1165/1165), 339.41 KiB | 0 bytes/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (312/312), done.
 * Running Git... # ( cd /var/lib/layman/sihnon  && /usr/bin/git config user.name "layman" )
 * Running Git... # ( cd /var/lib/layman/sihnon  && /usr/bin/git config user.email "layman@localhost" )
 * Successfully added overlay(s) sihnon.

serenity ~ # pmaint sync sihnon
*** syncing sihnon
Already up-to-date.
*** synced sihnon
serenity ~ # pmaint regen --use-local-desc --pkg-desc-index -t 1 sihnon
serenity ~ # echo $?
0

[Comment 2 Michał Górny 2017-04-26 06:33:15 UTC]

It's a problem when processing packages in the repository, so it can happen randomly depending on the package manager and what it does. AFAICS one of the metadata.xml files in the repository is invalid XML, so the package manager will fail when it tries to get metadata of that package.

The error message sucks but please just 'xmllint --valid' all metadata.xml and it will tell you which one fails.

[Comment 3 Michał Górny 2017-04-26 06:33:53 UTC]

Oh, sorry, it tells the package name now. So look at media-tv/tvheadend/metadata.xml.

[Comment 4 optiz0r 2017-04-26 12:28:58 UTC]

Ah, thanks. Found and removed errant newline from the start of the metadata.xml, xmllint no longer complains, but I was not able to reproduce the error using pmaint so will trust that's fixed also.

Commit: https://github.com/optiz0r/gentoo-overlay/commit/b22ab4387f734f54d223f701139d2ca3b893ba24