Starting a server with --password-file= causes a traceback and the session fails to start

[totaam]

Issue migrated from trac ticket # 1740

component: server | priority: minor | resolution: fixed

2018-01-12 17:21:45: maxmylyn created the issue

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Let me preface this ticket by stating:

Yes, I am aware that --password-file is intended to only be used for clients. I discovered this particular issue after trying to sort out why the automated tests were failing via some trial-and-error (read: disabling features until they finally started working again). As a temporary workaround I've disabled the password authentication for the tests, but I feel there is a bug here in that we don't handle this flag properly (even if it's being misused).

This was tested when trying to start a session on a Fedora 26 machine running a beta xpra v2.3-[r17837](../commit/b2f1276b9667ac08360b1a5ac121778fff3e3031) package from the beta repository.

The server was started with:

xpra start :15 --bind-tcp=0.0.0.0:10000 --start-child=xterm --start-via-proxy=no --systemd-run=no --tcp-auth=file,filename=password.txt --password-file=password.txt -d auth, and I get an immediate traceback:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/lib64/python2.7/site-packages/xpra/scripts/main.py", line 175, in main
    return run_mode(script_file, err, options, args, mode, defaults)
  File "/usr/lib64/python2.7/site-packages/xpra/scripts/main.py", line 1501, in run_mode
    return run_server(error_cb, options, mode, script_file, args, current_display)
  File "/usr/lib64/python2.7/site-packages/xpra/scripts/server.py", line 473, in run_server
    opts.password_file = os.path.abspath(opts.password_file)
  File "/usr/lib64/python2.7/posixpath.py", line 360, in abspath
    if not isabs(path):
  File "/usr/lib64/python2.7/posixpath.py", line 54, in isabs
    return s.startswith('/')
AttributeError: 'list' object has no attribute 'startswith'

Running it again without the --password-file= makes the traceback go away, and the session starts as expected.

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Note, I was testing the server start arguments with regards to how the automated tests start the server; specifically the authentication section when I stumbled across this traceback.

[totaam]

Trivial fix in r17992. (was caused by the changes for #1728)