[Pkg-utopia-maintainers] Bug#876743: flatpak: FTBFS on hppa: Creating new namespace failed: Invalid argument

[Simon McVittie]

On Mon, 25 Sep 2017 at 17:29:04 -0400, John David Anglin wrote:
> In the recent successful builds on panama, it seems bwrap fails and the
> tests were skipped.

That's normal on official buildds and machines that resemble them,
unfortunately. Flatpak uses bubblewrap (bwrap) for lightweight containers,
which is fine in a normal directory on a VM or real machine, but often
can't work when already inside a container or chroot, which is why
the Flatpak tests try a trivial bwrap run first to see whether they
can proceed.

I think the FTBFS that prompted this bug report was on a machine where
container syscalls work a bit better than on panama and on release
architectures' official buildds (so the tests aren't skipped completely),
but not as well as they do on my test VM (so the tests don't actually
*pass* either).

Official buildds are also locked-down for security reasons, and that
interferes with Flatpak's tests, causing some of them to be skipped
(kernel module loading isn't allowed, so no FUSE, for example).

> The bell and physik buildds have more memory (8 and 12 GB, respectively).

Flatpak doesn't need anywhere near that much RAM (I test it successfully
on an amd64 autopkgtest-virt-qemu VM with the default 1G RAM), so that's
unlikely to be relevant.

> I doubt the age of the kernels is the problem as current upstream kernels
> (e.g., v4.13.x) run on hppa.

OK, good to know. I thought I remembered some of the non-release
architectures needing very specific old kernels, but I'm glad to hear
hppa isn't one of those.

    smcv