Re: Can we run QEMU Avocado tests without root access?

[Cleber Rosa]

On Mon, Feb 22, 2021 at 12:23:17AM +0100, Philippe Mathieu-Daudé wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> On a system I want to run the QEMU integration tests I got:
>

Would you care to give more information about this system?  Is it
possible that it's a Debian-like system with "python3-minimal"
installed instead of "python3"?

> $ make check-venv
>   GIT     ui/keycodemapdb tests/fp/berkeley-testfloat-3
> tests/fp/berkeley-softfloat-3 dtc capstone slirp
>   VENV    build/tests/venv
> The virtual environment was not created successfully because ensurepip
> is not
> available.  On Debian/Ubuntu systems, you need to install the python3-venv
> package using the following command.
> 
>     apt-get install python3-venv
> 
> You may need to use sudo with that command.  After installing the
> python3-venv
> package, recreate your virtual environment.
> 
> Failing command: ['build/tests/venv/bin/python3', '-Im', 'ensurepip',
> '--upgrade', '--default-pip']
>

make check-{venv,acceptance} won't attempt to install pip, so I'm
guessing this message is coming from the Python distribution on
your system.  And notice that the bare venv *has* been created.

> make: *** [/home/philmd/qemu/tests/Makefile.include:98:
> build/tests/venv] Error 1
> 
> However I could do:
> 
> $ python3 -m pip install --user virtualenv
> Collecting virtualenv
>   Downloading virtualenv-20.4.2-py2.py3-none-any.whl (7.2 MB)
>      |████████████████████████████████| 7.2 MB 6.4 MB/s
> Collecting distlib<1,>=0.3.1
>   Downloading distlib-0.3.1-py2.py3-none-any.whl (335 kB)
>      |████████████████████████████████| 335 kB 6.4 MB/s
> Collecting appdirs<2,>=1.4.3
>   Downloading appdirs-1.4.4-py2.py3-none-any.whl (9.6 kB)
> Requirement already satisfied: six<2,>=1.9.0 in
> /usr/lib/python3/dist-packages (from virtualenv) (1.15.0)
> Collecting filelock<4,>=3.0.0
>   Downloading filelock-3.0.12-py3-none-any.whl (7.6 kB)
> Installing collected packages: distlib, appdirs, filelock, virtualenv
> Successfully installed appdirs-1.4.4 distlib-0.3.1 filelock-3.0.12
> virtualenv-20.4.2
> 
> $ virtualenv --version
> virtualenv 20.4.2 from
> /home/philmd/.local/lib/python3.9/site-packages/virtualenv/__init__.py
> 
> Note, there is still the old tests/venv/ dir created bug:
>

OK, noted.  We not have a formal bug report to work on:

   https://bugs.launchpad.net/qemu/+bug/1916506

> $ make check-venv
>   GIT     ui/keycodemapdb tests/fp/berkeley-testfloat-3
> tests/fp/berkeley-softfloat-3 dtc capstone slirp
> make: Nothing to be done for 'check-venv'.
> 
> Although it might be true... If I don't have root access, there is
> nothing to be done ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
>

With regards to your question on the subject line, one could attempt
to have a secondary Python installation with the *required packages*
(as per the documentation) installed as a non-root user.  And then,
you could give that Python path to configure.  The current
documentation states:

   Note: the build environment must be using a Python 3 stack, and have
   the ``venv`` and ``pip`` packages installed.  If necessary, make sure
   ``configure`` is called with ``--python=`` and that those modules are
   available.  On Debian and Ubuntu based systems, depending on the
   specific version, they may be on packages named ``python3-venv`` and
   ``python3-pip``.

IIUC, the improvement you suggest is to not require "python-venv" as a
package, but install it via "python3 -m pip".  One possible way to
rely *only* on Python 3 and setuptools (dropping venv and pip
requirements) would be to do something like:

   $ python3 -m ensurepip
   $ python3 -m pip install venv
   $ make check-venv

It's a valid approach, in theory.  In practice, depending on your
distro, you may not have "ensurepip" at all, even if it is a *standard
Python library*:

   https://docs.python.org/3/library/ensurepip.html

You can read about how those packaging decisions can become hell
in bug reports such as:

   https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/python3.4/+bug/1290847

In my experience, venv and pip have caveats and using the distro's
(complete) packages will give you an overall better experience.

While *one* could setup the dependencies as non-root, but I don't
think it should be used in the current check-venv rule.

Regards,
- Cleber.

> Thanks,
> 
> Phil.
>

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