"make install" confuses D-Bus daemon, preventing cockpitd from starting.

[mvollmer]

We install the D-Bus policy like this:

/usr/bin/install -c -m 644 data/com.redhat.Cockpit.conf '/etc/dbus-1/system.d'

However, the /usr/bin/install executable creates the file with mode 0600 and then chmods it to 0644. The D-Bus daemon waits for changes to that file, and might try to read it while it still has mode 0600. This results in this error:

dbus[322]: Encountered error 'Failed to open "/etc/dbus-1/system.d/com.redhat.Cockpit.conf": Permission denied' while parsing '/etc/dbus-1/system.d/com.redhat.Cockpit.conf'

After this, cockpitd can't start anymore. Workarounds are to touch the file or to run "systemctl reload dbus", or similar.

This is annoying during development, but doesn't affect our packages, of course.

[stefwalter]

I thought puiterwijk fixed this.

[mvollmer]

I thought puiterwijk fixed this.

No, see #408 (comment)

[mvollmer]

It's not a dramatic issue, but worth recording since it is a bit mysterious. The symptom is that after "make install" cockpit just hangs on the login screen.

[stefwalter]

Should we ditch install for this?

[mvollmer]

Should we ditch install for this?

Yes, if we want to cater to odd dbus behaviour in our Makefile. I think it would be reasonable.

[stefwalter]

I think we should also patch dbus-daemon to stop being so whiney about this sorta thing ... it seems that as a general principle each hack we have in our source code should have a corresponding upstream patch (and if not possible at least a bug filed).