[TIP] Weird problem with Jenkins: ShiningPanda plugin and Tox

[Chris Withers]

Hi Holger/Olivier,

Something has changed between 15th Feb and now in either Tox, distribute 
or virtualenv that results in a "Permission denied" error on Linux and 
Mac OS but not Windows:

IOError: [Errno 13] Permission denied: 
'py2.6/lib/python2.6/distutils/__init__.py'

This is what the output used to look like back in Feb:

http://jenkins.simplistix.co.uk/job/checker-tox/PYTHON=2.6,label=linux/7/console

Now the job emits:

http://jenkins.simplistix.co.uk/job/checker-tox/PYTHON=2.6,label=linux/8/console

No code has changed in the project under test. I first experienced this 
problem on another job on the same Jenkins server. I've made sure 
Jenkins and all its plugins, including ShiningPanda are now up to date, 
but I still get the result you see above :-(

Some observations:

- it's strange that the traceback appears to reference a python2.5 
virtualenv when it's Python 2.6 that's under test here. (yes, I want to 
keep 2.5 compatibility, but surely Tox/ShiningPanda should use the 
latest available python for its own use, rather than the earliest?)

- the contents of the distutils dir in question appear to be owned by root:

jenkins at server2:~/slave/workspace/checker-tox/PYTHON/2.6/label/linux/.tox$ 
ls -lah py2.6/lib/python2.6/distutils/
total 20K
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4.0K Jan  8 12:47 .
drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 4.0K Jun 30 11:48 ..
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 3.8K Jan  8 12:47 __init__.py
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 3.6K Jan  8 12:47 __init__.pyc
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  228 Jan  8 12:47 distutils.cfg

That seems very strange given that Jenkins entire interaction with this 
slave is via the jenkins user. How do these files come to be owned by root?

- what is trying to overwrite distutils/__init__.py and why?
   ("Overwriting py2.6/lib/python2.6/distutils/__init__.py with new 
content")

Hope you can help!

Chris

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