Failure: exec: "diff": cannot run executable found relative to current directory

The buf backend uses

BinaryShims

to get

diff

into the sandbox when running

buf

. I did some digging around and it sounds like Go since 1.19 (which I assume the latest

buf

release from a few days ago is compiled with) dislikes relative paths in `PATH` when running executables. Taking a look at

BinaryShims.bin_directory

, which is what’s added to

PATH

in order for

buf

to find our sandboxed

diff

, it is very much relative. The easy fix would be to set the absolute path of

BinaryShims.bin_directory

in

PATH

instead. The question is should this path be “absolutified” in the

buf

backend before passing it to

PATH

, or should

BinaryShims

be updated so

bin_directory

always is absolute? I’m also wondering if making it absolute will conflict with Pants’ caching somehow? That’s currently way outside my area of Pants knowledge!

but yea, making the PATH absolute to the sandbox would likely be a good idea, but one we don’t know when constructing PATH unfortunately, so would have to be a bootstrap step to adjust path before proceeding, I think

Jonas, if you wouldn’t mind opening a ticket on GH so can we track it there thanks 🙂

so would have to be a bootstrap step to adjust path before proceeding, I think

yup!

Fix: https://github.com/pantsbuild/pants/pull/17367

What is a little unfortunate is that it’s up to each call site to append the chroot prefix thing… maybe it could be a flag on the binary shims request whether the response has it on it’s path or not… as most times, it’ll likely be used as a PATH entry in which case it makes sense to have it.

Ah, hmm.. and as @fast-nail-55400 has pointed out in that PR is that this doesn’t work for remote execution, we’ll have to think of a better approach to solve this for the general case.