[DRE-maint] Bug#876768: ruby-pygments.rb: fails to run if RLIMIT_NOFILE is very high

[Adrian Bunk]

Control: severity -1 serious
Control: affects -1 asciidoctor

On Mon, Sep 25, 2017 at 05:44:57PM +0100, James Cowgill wrote:
> Package: ruby-pygments.rb
> Version: 0.6.3-2
> Severity: important
> Control: affects -1 src:asciidoctor src:weechat
> X-Debbugs-CC: weechat at packages.debian.org
> 
> Hi,
> 
> weechat recently FTBFS due to asciidoctor dying:
> https://buildd.debian.org/status/fetch.php?pkg=weechat&arch=mips64el&ver=1.9.1-1&stamp=1506204287&raw=0
> 
> This happens because:
> - The RLIMIT_NOFILE hard limit is set to a large value (eg 1048576).
> - On startup, ruby-pygments's mentos.py attempts to close all files.
> - Since RLIMIT_NOFILE is large, it will attempt to close 1 million file
>   descriptors.
> - The mips64el buildds are not powerful enough to complete this in the
>   timeout time set in popen.rb (default 8 seconds).
> - The pygments call fails, returns nil, and causes asciidoctor to crash.
> 
> I can occasionally reproduce this on an amd64 machine, but only under
> heavy load (most of the time it's fast enough).
> 
> I think either the number of files to be closed should be limited, or
> the piece of code which closes files should be removed altogether.

Thanks a lot for this analysis.

I am raising the severity to RC since it causes weechat to FTBFS
(100% of the times when I tried on eller).
 
> Thanks,
> James

cu
Adrian

-- 

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