Re: [Savannah-hackers-public] mail-sending error from git server updating emacs "concurrency" branch

[Bob Proulx]

Hi Paul!

Paul Smith wrote:
> > > > remote:     self.send_signal(signal.SIGTERM)
>...
> > > > remote: OSError: [Errno 1] Operation not permitted
> 
> It looks like the code is trying to send SIGTERM to this PID (using
> kill(2) underneath I expect), and it's failing with errno 1 "operation
> not permitted".  That's all the error info we get back from the OS, so
> there's no way to know exactly why it wasn't permitted.

If I make an assumption that the system was operating very slowly due
to external disk I/O waits and if I guess that the code is timing out
then it might try to clean up the timeout by sending a SIGTERM.  That
is probably a section of code rarely used and unlikely to be tested.

> That seems odd because the most obvious reason for this is that you're
> not the owner of the PID, but doesn't this code actually start that PID?
> Maybe it's setuid?  Well, you're right that the only way to find out
> more is read the code in git_multimail.py to see exactly what's going
> on.

I assume it is calling /usr/sbin/sendmail.

  vcs:/srv/git/emacs.git# ll /usr/lib/sendmail 
  lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 13 Aug  3  2014 /usr/lib/sendmail -> ../sbin/exim4
  vcs:/srv/git/emacs.git# ll -L /usr/lib/sendmail 
  -rwsr-xr-x 1 root root 758788 Jul 13  2014 /usr/lib/sendmail

Bob