Bug#373700: posixtestsuite: Building the package as root on amd64 changes the system clock permanently

[Andreas Jochens <aj@andaco.de>]

Hello,

thanks for looking at this problem.

On 06-Jun-14 23:57, Steve Langasek wrote:
> Well, I guess it's not a good idea to build this package as root then... :)

Obviously, yes :)

> I can't justify keeping this bug at RC severity, though.  This clearly
> doesn't have any usability or data loss impact on users, it doesn't /fail/
> to build, and while this might be considered data loss of a sort when
> building, it's not the common case to build as root and I would suggest that
> it's generally not advisable to do so with any package.  (If the package is
> put together right, this isn't even happening in one of the as-root targets,
> so even using -rsudo should be ok, yes?)

Of course, packages should not be built as root generally. However,
this package seems to be special because it consists of a set of POSIX 
compatibility tests some of which have to be run as root to work
properly. The intended usage of this package is to download the
source package and to build it. The package description says:

"This is a dummy package.  If you want to run the testsuite, use the 
source  package of the same name (e.g. apt-get source posixtestsuite)."

To summarize, I think that the intended way to use this package is
to build it as root. This was my reason for filing the bug with
RC severity.

> So, downgrading, though obviously we should want to see this fixed.

OK, and sorry for the noise.

Regards
Andreas Jochens