Re: [PATCH] test: fix 'make assets' failure as root

[Stefano Brivio <sbrivio@redhat.com>]

On Thu, 25 Sep 2025 09:53:06 +0100
"Richard W.M. Jones" <rjones@redhat.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Sep 25, 2025 at 01:43:06PM +0800, Yumei Huang wrote:
> > Running `make assets` under `test` as root fails with a "Permission denied"
> > error when `prepare-distro-img.sh` invokes `virt-edit` and `guestfish`. This
> > is due to a known bug in libvirt.
> > 
> > Work around the issue by switching to the direct backend.
> > 
> > Signed-off-by: Yumei Huang <yuhuang@redhat.com>
> > ---
> >  test/prepare-distro-img.sh | 2 ++
> >  1 file changed, 2 insertions(+)
> > 
> > diff --git a/test/prepare-distro-img.sh b/test/prepare-distro-img.sh
> > index 0d967c9..423eea7 100755
> > --- a/test/prepare-distro-img.sh
> > +++ b/test/prepare-distro-img.sh
> > @@ -3,6 +3,8 @@
> >  IMG="$1"
> >  PASST_FILES="$(echo ../*.c ../*.h ../*.sh ../*.1 ../Makefile ../README.md)"
> >  
> > +export LIBGUESTFS_BACKEND=direct  
> 
> Please add a comment that this is only added as a temporary hack until
> we can get a proper fix (in libguestfs possibly, see Dan's earlier
> email).

On the other hand, regardless of that fix, I would be happy to be run
this on single-user Alpine L1 guests, eventually, where libguestfs
doesn't depend on libvirt (see my caveat 2.), and I usually reserve
very little disk space for those.

If you don't have compelling reasons (like you're dropping
LIBGUESTFS_BACKEND=direct in two weeks), I would simply keep this as
long as it works. The day you drop that, we'll drop this too.

This part won't be executed as part of automated distribution tests
either, so occasional breakages are really unproblematic.

Do you see any further issue with it?

-- 
Stefano