The stdlib 'subprocess' module in python-2.7.4 through 2.7.7 suffers
from http://bugs.python.org/issue18851 which causes unrelated file
descriptors to be closed when `subprocess.call()` fails the `exec()`,
such as when the executable being invoked does not actually exist. There
appears to be some randomness involved. This was fixed in python-2.7.8.
Tahoe's iputil.py uses subprocess.call on many different "ifconfig"-type
executables, most of which don't exist on any given platform (added in
git commit 8e31d66cd0). This results in a lot of file-descriptor
closing, which (at least during unit tests) tends to clobber important
things like Tub TCP sockets. This seems to be the root cause behind
ticket:2121, in which normal code tries to close already-closed sockets,
crashing the unit tests. Since different platforms have different
ifconfigs, some platforms will experience more failed execs than others,
so this bug could easily behave differently on linux vs freebsd, as well
as working normally on python-2.7.8 or 2.7.4.
This patch inserts a guard to make sure that os.path.isfile() is true
before allowing Popen.call() to try executing the target. This ought to
be enough to avoid the bug. It changes both iputil.py and
allmydata.__init__ (which uses Popen for calling "lsb_release"), which
are all the places where 'subprocess' is used outside of unit tests.
Other potential fixes: use the 'subprocess32' module from PyPI (which is
a bug-free backport of the Python3 stdlib subprocess module, but would
introduce a new dependency), or require python >= 2.7.8 (but this would
rule out development/deployment on the current OS-X 10.9 release, which
ships with 2.7.5, as well as other distributions like Ubuntu 14.04 LTS).
I believe this closes ticket:2121, and given the apparent relationship
between 2121 and 2023, I think it also closes ticket:2023 (although
since 2023 doesn't have copies of the failing log files, it's hard to
tell). I'm hoping that this will tide us over until 1.11 is released, at
which point we can execute on the plan to remove iputil.py entirely by
changing the way that nodes learn their externally-facing IP address.
For one thing, this makes missing-dependency failures into DistributionNotFound errors instead of ImportErrors, which might be more useful to the user. For another thing, if someone is using distributions that were installed with --multi-version, then they might be not importable until after require_auto_deps() has been run. (The docs claim that this would be the case, but we don't have an example of this happening at this time.)
It is currently hardcoded in setup.py to be 'allmydata-tahoe'. Ticket #556 is to make it configurable by a runtime command-line argument to setup.py: "--appname=foo", but I suddenly wondered if we really wanted that and at the same time realized that we don't need that for tahoe-1.3.0 release, so this patch just hardcodes it in setup.py.
setup.py inspects a file named 'src/allmydata/_appname.py' and assert that it contains the string "__appname__ = 'allmydata-tahoe'", and creates it if it isn't already present. src/allmydata/__init__.py import _appname and reads __appname__ from it. The rest of the Python code imports allmydata and inspects "allmydata.__appname__", although actually every use it uses "allmydata.__full_version__" instead, where "allmydata.__full_version__" is created in src/allmydata/__init__.py to be:
__full_version__ = __appname + '-' + str(__version__).
All the code that emits an "application version string" when describing what version of a protocol it supports (introducer server, storage server, upload helper), or when describing itself in general (introducer client), usese allmydata.__full_version__.
This fixes ticket #556 at least well enough for tahoe-1.3.0 release.
