[pkg-gnupg-maint] Bug#834683: fixed in mini-buildd 1.0.17

[Santiago Vila]

On Sun, Sep 11, 2016 at 07:40:31PM +0200, Stephan Sürken wrote:

> > The error message:
> (...)
> > suggests to me that there is not enough entropy to generate a key.
> 
> If entropy actually is the problem, it should have always been there
> for all 1.0.x versions (having that doctest).

Well, maybe the problem has always been there.

Maybe official autobuilders have a lot of entropy and we have never
found the problem there, but IMHO we should not take that for granted
in the general case.

> > This time I only tried to build it once, but since the problem was
> > not
> > supposed to always happen, it is probably correct to say that the
> > FTBFS-randomness has not been eliminated.
>
> Ok, agree, this does add some randomness [which I usually mitigate
> running something like haveged on the builder host].> I guess this
> generally means automated tests depending on some entropy must be
> avoided?

If they make the build to fail, or they make the build to take an
unreasonable amount of time, yes, I would think so.

But I really don't know. A quick search on gnupg and /dev/random
led me to the "haveged" package you mention.

This is the kind of "entropy helper" package I believed it "had" to exist,
but I have never used any of them really.

Would be possible to have haveged as a build-dependency of this
package so that it works automatically and avoids the problem in a
generic way for every kind of autobuilder trying to build the package?

Maybe we should ask dkg and the other people maintaining gnupg about
what it's usually done in cases like this (package needing a lot of
entropy in its build system).

I'm Cc:ing them.

Thanks.