Subject: Re: Test "t0300-credentials" is failing on Arch/Artix: asks to enter the Username/Password in an infinite loop

From: Jeff King <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 6 Mar 2026 11:01:31 -0500

On Fri, Mar 06, 2026 at 05:14:45PM +0300, Ivan Ivanov wrote:

> Friends, thank you so much for your kind help! Indeed: it turned out
> that if /dev/shm is mounted with noexec then "--root=/dev/shm" is
> failing. If you would like to ensure that the git tests are succeeding
> regardless of what are the mount flags on some system or what some
> distro's packagers are doing (more portability), maybe it is possible
> to modify the git test system - to make it so that "askpass" always
> gets launched from a native original directory, instead of being
> copied to some "root" place where it could fail?

it would be possible to do that, but introduce a lot of complexity.
Right now test scripts are given a single temporary scratch directory
with a repo to do whatever they want with. If we gave each one _two_
directories, one for putting executable things and one for repo
operations, then the latter could be on a noexec filesystem.

But why do we want to support pointing --root to a noexec filesystem in
the first place? I think this falls into "if it hurts, don't do it".

-Peff