[Piuparts-devel] Bug#767489: sid2experimental checks fail due to apt changing ownership of /var/cache/apt/archives/partial

[Helmut Grohne]

Package: piuparts
Version-Description: the one that currently runs piuparts.debian.org

Many sid2experimental checks (~150) fail with the following error:

| 0m45.3s DEBUG: Modified(uid, gid, mode, size, target): /var/cache/apt/archives/partial/ (0, 0, d 40755, 40, None) != (104, 0, d 40700, 40, None)
| 0m45.3s ERROR: FAIL: After purging files have been modified:
|   /var/cache/apt/archives/partial/	 owned by: apt

To see some instances, check random logs at:
https://piuparts.debian.org/sid2experimental/unclassified_failures.html

The experimental version of apt adds privilege separation. It drops root
when downloading binary packages from mirrors to be less vulnerable to
bugs in the transport (http, ftp, ...) implementation. In order to do
so, the unprivileged process needs to be able to write to the partial
folder. Thus apt changes ownership of that folder as can be seen above.

It is not clear to me, how to make the sid2experimental tests useful
again.

Please keep in mind that apt will eventually get uploaded to sid. At
that point this bug will apply to all testing2sid checks.

Helmut