python's os.getgroups() fails as root on 10.6 SL

[league@…]

My rdiff-backup script fails on snow leopard because of this issue that arose with python25. When run as root, os.getgroups() causes an OSError exception. This did not occur on 10.5, but it occurs on 10.6 with both python 2.5 and 2.6.

% python2.6 
Python 2.6.2 (r262:71600, Sep 22 2009, 09:48:09) 
[GCC 4.2.1 (Apple Inc. build 5646)] on darwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import os
>>> os.getgroups()
[501, 204, 100, 98, 81, 80, 79, 61, 12, 101, 402, 102]
>>> 
% sudo python2.6
Python 2.6.2 (r262:71600, Sep 22 2009, 09:48:09) 
[GCC 4.2.1 (Apple Inc. build 5646)] on darwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import os
>>> os.getgroups()
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
OSError: [Errno 22] Invalid argument
>>> 

As I said, my main concern is getting rdiff-backup to work as root. That relies explicitly on python25, but I imagine the fix would be the same for both. Incidentally, the python 2.6.1 distributed with the OS does not exhibit this problem, so building rdiff-backup against that may be a workaround.

[blb@…]

Fixed in r58151, thanks for finding that.

[league@…]

So fast, thanks! Could this same patch be applied to python25, or will we have to fix rdiff-backup to move to 2.6 (which will also entail porting py25-xattr)?

[blb@…]

py26-xattr has been added in r58160. However, when it comees to rdiff-backup, updating it to python 2.6 would be a good idea, but there is one issue. Both python 2.5 and 2.6 versions of xattr want to install ${prefix}/bin/xattr (and py26-xattr lists a conflict with py25-xattr). If you have rdiff-backup already installed with py25, upgrading to py26 will fail due to this conflict.

I'd say open a ticket for rdiff-backup, maybe a good solution can be found.