On Sun, 20 Oct 2024 at 19:56:42 +0000, Daniel Markstedt wrote:
> In the end, I went with the "needs-sudo" restriction instead, to be
> able to run the actual test suite as non-root.
That's often a good choice if only a minority of your test needs to
do privileged things. gvfs is one of the canonical examples of this:
it uses its sudo access to set up a Samba server to test against, but
then runs the actual test as the non-root user.
> I'm using Perl and the Test::Simple module as the runner, and
> couldn't figure out how to drop to non-root when using the "needs-root"
> restriction.
Any of the same ways you might drop to non-root in production code should
work (for example running commands wrapped in runuser, setpriv or sudo,
or calling POSIX::setuid or similar). There is nothing particularly special
about autopkgtest here.
> I attempted setting the AUTOPKGTEST_NORMAL_USER environment variable
> subsequently in the Perl script, but it didn't take any effect with this
> particular test runner.
That isn't how that environment variable works, and I'm not aware of
any way that setting an environment variable could change your uid
as a side-effect. It works the other way round: it isn't how you tell
autopkgtest to change to the normal user, it's how autopkgtest tells
your test-case a normal user that you might want to use.
Specifically, if your test was run as root via the needs-root restriction,
and you want to drop privileges to a non-root uid by whatever mechanism
is most appropriate for your test (runuser or POSIX::setuid or whatever),
then $AUTOPKGTEST_NORMAL_USER is the username of a non-root uid that
autopkgtest suggests as being appropriate for that purpose.
smcv
