Things I’ve done this week (2023-03-27—2023-03-31). This is mostly a log for myself so that I remember that I did things™ but you may be interested in reading it too, for whatever reason.

Don’t skip all directories when tidy-checking⌗

While I’ve technically done this the week before, the PR has been merged this week, so I’ll document it here.

Context: in rustc development we have this thing called tidy. It is basically a custom linter to check some code style related things in the code base. The implementation is messy, but it works.

Well the gist of the problem fixed by my PR is that it stopped working. More precisely it stopped checking all files that live in directories (i.e. almost all files) because of a bug introduced by a PR that was meant to speed up it (well, I mean, doing nothing is pretty fast, so-). I’ve noticed this while trying to do another change in tidy and not being able to test my change.

Debugging the issue was a little big weird, because I assumed that the bug was in a specific check, rather than in the whole file-check-framework, but after a bit of dbg! debug printing I figured everything out. The fix itself wasn’t hard — change a check that a file has an extension so that it doesn’t ignore directories (that almost never have extensions).

However, after the fix was done & even reviewed, merging the PR proved to be hard. First of all we have (or had? I did not watch this closely) an issue that basically made it so merge fails 50% of the time, because of some weird issue in CI (see this discussion and this issue for details). Moreover it turns out that without the automatic tidy checks the code was not kept tidy, which meant that there was a high change that any merged PR made my PR unmergeable. But, eventually, it was merged so all is good :)

Installing git on dev-desktop⌗

While this isn’t something that was done publicly, I still want to document this, since it was wild.

Context: I’m using a thing called dev-desktop — a service managed by the rust infra team, that allows rust contributors to use a cloud machine to contribute to rust. This mostly helps if you (like me) have slow/old/etc computer locally, which makes it harder to work with a big project like rust.

Context 2: on the dev-desktop machines the OS is ubuntu, which is annoying for many reasons, including outdated packages. One of the most annoying cases of outdated packages is git which, for example, doesn’t have the setting to make git push automatically create remote branches (push.autoSetupRemote).

And so, I’ve seen that fee1-dead solved this by installing git via nix (which you can do for your user without having root on the system, etc). This seemed easy at first, but later proved to be quite difficult due to computers being what they are.

First of all I cargo install nix-user-chroot and started following the [tutorial](https://nixos.wiki/wiki/Nix_Installation_Guide#nix-user-chroot “https://nixos.wiki/wiki/Nix_Installation_Guide#nix-user-chroot).

The first problem turned out to be that I accidentally made it so that when I logging to shell, the chroot is entered multiple times, but since this is not allowed, the second attempt to enter chroot fails, crashing the shell. Now, this would be fine if I had an open ssh session and could fix that, but in the only open connection I did . the_shell_config, which abruptly ended my ssh session, locking myself out of dev-desktop. Moreover, it turns out that without working shell, it is impossibly to do anything through ssh:

ssh runs your shell
ssh "/bin/bash" and alike run the command in the shell via ``$SHELL -c command`
scp also opens shell to run sftp server in it, so overwriting config with it is not an option (it just outputs scp: Connection closed)
and so on — it is literally impossible to do anything, without another way to access the machine
unless you have a known vulnerability with RCE, see this question

In the end I written to the t-infra channel on rust zulip, after which someone from the team commented out my problematic configs, fixing this problem.

The next problem was actually figuring out how to not run chroot multiple times, I ended up checking if ~/.nix-profile/bin/nix-env exists.

The next problem was vscode’s ssh feature not working. Turned out that since I’ve re-ran fish -l in the chroot, my shell config never ended, so ssh’s command did not get executed (internally vscode does ssh host command). Eventually I figured that I can check for status is-interactive before entering chroot.

The last (phew) problem was that the newly installed git, did not actually work:

:~/rust-b (better_docs_for_e0223); git push --force-with-lease
sudo: /etc/sudo.conf is owned by uid 65534, should be 0
sudo: /usr/bin/sudo must be owned by uid 0 and have the setuid bit set
^C⏎

Turns out dev-desktop uses a custom git credentials helper, which uses sudo to switch to some special user and the sudo just straight up does not work inside chroot. This was one of the most annoying issues here, having many sub-issues (I don’t even want to remember anything about the path that lead to the final solution…), annoying shell techicalities, etc, etc…

In the end, my workaround is to run a server outside of chroot, that runs the dev-desktop git credentials helper when nc-ed into. I don’t like this solution, it seems very fragile and bad, but it works, so I’ll allow it.

~/.config/fish/conf.d/nix.fish:

# This is needed for the nix *in* chroot to work properly
# (exports some variables and stuff)
# (this was "added by Nix installer")
if test -e ~/.nix-profile/etc/profile.d/nix.fish;
    . ~/.nix-profile/etc/profile.d/nix.fish;
end

# This is needed to enter chroot
if test -e ~/.cargo/bin/nix-user-chroot;
    # Only enter chroot once
    # (otherwise it crashes shell)
    and not test -e ~/.nix-profile/bin/nix-env;
    # Don't run chroot if this is a non-interactive shell
    # (otherwise `ssh host command` hangs)
    and status is-interactive;

   # Before entering chroot, start a server that allows to get credentials from outside of chroot
   ~/unchroot-server/target/debug/unchroot-server &

   # Run a new shell inside chroot
   ~/.cargo/bin/nix-user-chroot ~/.nix fish -l;
end

~/.gitconfig (the empty helper = is needed to disable the non-hacked one):

[credential]
	helper =
[credential]
	helper = "~/git-credential-nix-chroot-compat"

~/git-credential-nix-chroot-compat:

#!/bin/fish

# if inside the chroot ...
if test -e /home/gh-WaffleLapkin/.nix-profile/bin/nix-env;
    # try connecting to the outside-of-chroot-server
    echo -e $argv "\n" (string join "\n" (cat -)) | nc localhost 6666
else
    # otherwise just run the actual credential helper
    git-credential-dev-desktop $argv;
end

The server:

use std::{
    io::{self, BufRead, BufReader},
    net::{TcpListener, TcpStream},
    process::{Command, Stdio},
};

fn main() -> std::io::Result<()> {
    let listener = TcpListener::bind("0.0.0.0:6666")?;

    // accept connections and process them serially
    for stream in listener.incoming() {
        handle_client(stream?);
    }
    Ok(())
}

fn handle_client(stream: TcpStream) {
    stream
        .set_write_timeout(Some(std::time::Duration::from_secs(5)))
        .ok();

    stream
        .set_read_timeout(Some(std::time::Duration::from_secs(1)))
        .ok();

    let Ok(stream_clone) = stream.try_clone() else { return };

    let mut streamr = BufReader::new(stream);
    let mut streamw = stream_clone;

    let mut buf = String::new();
    streamr.read_line(&mut buf).ok();

    let Ok(child) = Command::new("git-credential-dev-desktop").args(buf.split(' ')).stdin(Stdio::piped()).stdout(Stdio::piped()).spawn() else { return; };
    let Some(mut stdin) = child.stdin else { return };
    let Some(mut stdout) = child.stdout else { return };

    std::thread::spawn(move || _ = io::copy(&mut streamr, &mut stdin));

    io::copy(&mut stdout, &mut streamw).ok();
}

Reviews⌗

Pull requests I’ve reviewed in this week:

teloxide/867 — basic documentation change, no need to scare users about a problem that was fixed a while ago
rust/109347 — #[no_mangle] adjacent fix
rust/109554 — suggest 0..=255u8 instead of 0..256u8 (which overflows)
rust/109149 — improved suggestions for wrong usages of write!
rust/109779 — dependency updates
rust/109762 — add a usage of IndexVec (an internal wrapper around Vec that allows use of new-typed indices)

Stream⌗

I’m trying to stream coding regularly now! The schedule so far is every Wednesday at 15:30 UTC for about 3 hours. Although I’m thinking of adjusting that…

This week I’ve been trying to work on rustc diagnostics.

My first pick was issue #109425 where a suggestion to remove function arguments leaves a trailing comma. This turned out to be tricky. It’s difficult to produce a correct suggestion, while also keeping the style of trailing comma, mostly because we don’t have access to the commas (the code representation at hand doesn’t tell anything about commas). Also the way this diagnostic is made is … complicated, which makes it even worse. In the end I figured a hack and made a PR: #109782. I don’t like this solution, but it fixes the issue, I think. We’ll see what reviewers tell me.

The second pick was #109271 which is arguable even worse… The gist of the issue is this:

// f takes ``&mut self` and passes it to the closure
self.f(|this| self.x());
//           /^^^^^^^^
// this is an error since `self` is borrowed uniqly by `f`

We’d like for rustc to suggest changing self to this, since this is a common-ish pattern.

The problem is that such diagnostic must live inside the borrow checker, and the borrow checker diagnostics are very hard to do. This is because borrowck operates on MIR from which you can’t easily get what the user has written. On top of that I had to do some shenanigans I did not know how to do, on top of that I was becoming more and more tired as the stream progressed. In the end I made some progress, I think I’m half way through it, but ultimately had to end the stream without finishing the fix.

I’m not sure this was a good stream, struggling while being watched is not the best feeling, although I guess it can be education.

It’s probably just that I don’t have enough experience, and in time my streams will be better and better… But it’s very hard to believe in myself sometimes.

Summary⌗

I’ve been struggling with productivity recently, this week was mostly uneventful and foggy. To be honest I’m in a quite depressing mood, thinking that I’m not doing enough/that I’m doing everything wrong/etc. Idk what to say, hopefully I’ll get better :“)

P.S. yes, forgot to publish at the end of the week, oops P.P.S. if you’ve read all of this: sorry

Waffle Devlog 0

Don’t skip all directories when tidy-checking⌗

Installing git on dev-desktop⌗

Reviews⌗

Stream⌗

Summary⌗