[mcdonc]

Summary

Fixes the Oct 26 daily-fuzz failure (run 40320711358): the run died 49s into shell evaluation with error: getting attributes of path "/nix/store/…-builder.pl": No such file or directory — the same per-eval coin flip retry-on-invalid-path.sh exists to absorb (#2774 / cachix/devenv#3064), but in the stat-failure wording rather than the database-miss is not valid wording the wrapper's signature matched, so the one-retry conversion never ran. Closes #3594. The #3591 bootstrap fix from the prior day is uninvolved and intact — this failure is one layer earlier (eval, before any task ran).

The wrapper now retries both phantom-missing-store-path wordings, tolerating either quote style; the ANSI strip is printf-built so it works on BSD sed as well as GNU (nix colorizes when it believes stderr is a terminal — run 40320711358's log carried raw SGR sequences between the tokens). All four consumers (devenv-setup Prepare/Build, e2e-suite, fuzz-daily Build images) get the widened match automatically.

Verification

• New behavior tests (scripts/tests/test_retry_on_invalid_path.py, the test_podman_reexec_retry pattern) execute the real wrapper against fake commands: each wording retries once and succeeds (including an SGR-colored message), an unrelated failure passes through with its original exit code and no retry, and a signature on both attempts fails after exactly one retry.
• Full scripts/tests: 218 passed; xenon gate passed.

Notes

• The fuzz-daily-retry safety net correctly did not fire (it keys on the eviction signature — upload step skipped — and here the upload step ran); widening it is deliberately out of scope: a bootstrap failure should stay red, and the wrapper is where the mechanism lives.

[mcdonc]

Fresh-eyes review

Investigation complete. Probes of the real wrapper (exit codes preserved in every case, retried = whether the ::warning annotation fired):

Probe	Result
error: path /nix/store/abc is not valid (unquoted)	rc=7, retried — widening works
error: path "/nix/store/abc" is not valid (double-quoted)	rc=7, retried
error: path '/nix/store/abc' is not valid-ish	rc=7, retried (substring match)
error: getting attributes of path "src/foo.py": No such file…	rc=7, not retried — /nix/store anchor holds
… path /etc/passwd: No such file…	rc=7, not retried
error: path '/nix/store/a is not valid (unterminated quote)	rc=7, retried (opening quote independently optional)
no error: prefix	not retried
signature + rc=0	rc=0, no retry
signature split across lines	not retried (grep is line-based)
signature on stdout only, rc≠0	retried (pre-existing 2>&1 | tee behavior)

Regex bytes verified via od: the class is [^'"]* — no stray backslash (bash collapses \" inside double quotes). Xenon rank A on the test file; macos-smoke.yml:135 runs scripts/tests, so the BSD-sed claim is exercised on macOS (where the old \x1b pattern would fail the ANSI test). All five tests pass; bash -n clean.

Blocking issues

None found.

Important issues

None found. Specifically checked and cleared:

• /nix/store anchor — required literally in both regexes (retry-on-invalid-path.sh:27-30); project-file and non-store stat failures pass through. Retrying those wouldn't mask anything anyway (retry-once, rc preserved), but the anchor avoids pointless double-runs.
• False-retry risk — unchanged in kind from the old wrapper: both grep the same combined stdout+stderr log; a test binary echoing the signature still triggers one retry but the final exit code is the command's own (pinned by test_signature_on_both_attempts_fails_after_one_retry). The diff widens only the accepted wordings/quote styles, nothing about where output is scanned.
• Portability — sed "s/$(printf '\033')\\[[0-9;]*m//g" collapses to a raw ESC byte + \[ in the pattern; equivalent on GNU sed, correct on BSD sed (which doesn't support \xHH). printf is a bash builtin; shebang is bash.

Nits / questions

• retry-on-invalid-path.sh:52 — stripped=$(strip_ansi "$log") now runs on every failed attempt including attempt 2, where it's unused (the old short-circuit skipped it). Wasted work on a big log; harmless.
• Overreach verified but unpinned: the quote classes are independently optional, so is not valid-ish and unterminated-quote variants match. Bounded harm; no action needed.
• .github/actions/devenv-setup/action.yml:69-71 — the Prepare-step comment still describes only the "path ... is not valid" wording; now stale relative to the wrapper's two-wordings contract.
• No test pins the unquoted-path widening (probed manually above: it retries). If someone later tightens the quotes to required, the suite stays green.
• Only the first test asserts the annotation text; fine, but a shared assertion would pin the ::warning for both wordings.
• On Linux (GNU sed) the ANSI test passes with the old \x1b pattern too — the BSD fix is only verifiable on the macos-smoke runner. Acceptable given macos-smoke runs scripts/tests.
• Changelog correctly skipped (CI-infra only, per the skip rule); the "remove once nix 2.35 is pinned" header contract is intact.

Verdict

APPROVE — the fix is correct, tightly scoped, well-tested, and every adversarial probe either retried harmlessly or passed through with its original exit code.

---

The three nits (stale Prepare-step comment, lazy ANSI strip, unquoted-path test pin + annotation assertion) landed in 2c78558; 219 tests green.

[mcdonc]

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[mcdonc]

Successfully created backport PR for stable/2.0:

• Retry the second phantom-store-path eval wording in the devenv retry wrapper (#3594) #3596