openQA Project (public)

I'd argue that this is not a feature request but rather a bug because this was working before.

ph03nix wrote:

I'd argue that this is not a feature request but rather a bug because this was working before.

Can you clarify e.g. is this a recent regression? Maybe if you have a job that used to work? If it wasn't already cleaned up in the meanwhile, adding this ticket would stop it from being removed.

cdywan wrote:

Can you clarify e.g. is this a recent regression? Maybe if you have a job that used to work? If it wasn't already cleaned up in the meanwhile, adding this ticket would stop it from being removed.

This is a recent regression. I have a automated script that creates symlinks to assets, which used to work until recently it stopped working with exactly this issue.

I only have failures on my own openQA instance, but it's trivial to reproduce the issue (use a symlinked asset)

@ph03nix is there a difference for absolute and relative symlinks?
e.g. the link under HDD_1 points to another file with a relative or absolute path?
I just tested it, and can confirm that a relative path does not work (although it results in a different error), but with an absolute path it works.

The reason is that we create a (hard) link in the pool directory to the path in HDD_1, basically doing the equivalent of ln /path/to/hdd_filename /pool/hdd_filename, and if /path/to/hdd_filename -> relfile then that results in /pool/hdd_filename -> relfile, because it just hardlinks a symlink.

I can't see any recent changes related to that.

So using absolute symlinks on your side should be a workaround for now.

Meanwhile I'm thinking about what would be the best to do on our side.
We fall back to symlinks if the hard link fails, anyway, so we could just check if the asset file is a symlink.

Hey Tina! Good job and thanks for the fix! AFAICS this should resolve it as a whole. Do you still need something from me?

@ph03nix I would only be curious if you can confirm my conclusion:

• Absolute symlinks have been working before my fix, only relative symlinks didn't
• I can't see any recent changes related to this, so it's not a regression

Then I can turn this into a feature request retroactively :)

tinita wrote:

@ph03nix I would only be curious if you can confirm my conclusion:

• Absolute symlinks have been working before my fix, only relative symlinks didn't

AFAICS my script always created relative symlinks and I'm still using relative symlinks there. Only recently I had to replace them by hardlinks.

• I can't see any recent changes related to this, so it's not a regression

I share your observation that there have not been recent changes, however this is in contradiction with my observation that a automated script which I haven't touched in a year at some point in the last months stopped working.

From my observation, this was a regression, but that's IMHO also a minor and irrelevant taxonomical detail, as long as it's fixed ;-)

Then I can turn this into a feature request retroactively :)

No objections from my side, and thanks for the fix :-)

tinita wrote:

Ok. One last question: How many months could "last months" be roughly?

3-6 months. I wish I could give you a more accurate time window but I can't :-(

We didn't have tests for relative symlinks, so it's at least possible that there is some other place that could have influenced that behaviour, so I would be curious, but only if I have a more concrete time frame to look into :)

I fully understand, unfortunately I can't tell because I didn't used the affected symlinked assets on my test instance in a long time.

Ok I see. thanks anyway!

Thanks to you! :-)