Description
The pbench-config command is identical for agent and server. Note that we connect to our config file with the definition of either _PBENCH_SERVER_CONFIG or _PBENCH_AGENT_CONFIG, and pbench-config, as common code, needs to make a decision.
What it does is look for both, in sequence; so if _PBENCH_AGENT_CONFIG is defined, it's the agent pbench-config, even if your containerized unit test is looking for a server configuration setting. But if it's not found, there's no complaint: it simply returns nothing.
We can try to be very careful never to have both defined; the question is whether there's anything we can or should do to make it a bit easier to diagnose the problem when this happens. E.g., should pbench-config generate a stderr message if the section that's specified doesn't exist, identifying the config file in which it was looking? Is our config variable namespace (especially at the section level) well enough segmented that pbench-config could look through both files if both environment variable are defined?
One resolution to this issue is to simply say "stop doing that"; it's not entirely satisfying, but we can hope this won't occur often and now we're at least aware of it.