Hi all,
I've run into an aspect of matplotlib's setup that seems awkward. I'm seeing
this on Ubuntu, but I imagine it would happen on any *nix platform.
If python is running under sudo the first time matplotlib is imported, then
matplotlib creates its config dir (~/.matplotlib) with root as the owner.
Subsequent attempts to import matplotlib while running python as a
non-privileged user result in this:
-----------------------------------------------------------------
RuntimeError: '/home/philip' is not a writable dir; you must set
/home/philip/.matplotlib to be a writable dir. You can also set environment
variable MPLCONFIGDIR to any writable directory where you want matplotlib data
stored
-----------------------------------------------------------------
A simple way to re-create this --
1. Delete or rename ~/.matplotlib
2. sudo python -c "import matplotlib"
3. python -c "import matplotlib"
This not-improbable real-world scenario would create ~/.matplotlib owned by
root --
1) Download app FooBar that has matplotlib as a dependency
2) Install matplotlib
3) Run FooBar's setup.py as sudo. It imports matplotlib, perhaps just to ensure
that matplotlib is installed and working.
We ran into a similar situation with our app ('sudo python setup.py install'
created desktop icons owned by root) and we resolved it by invoking chown after
using a getenv() call to sniff out who we really wanted to own the file.
It looks like the diff below (untested!) applied to lib/matplotlib/__init__.py
would prevent this from happening. Does it seems reasonable to add it?
474a475,485
> if not sys.platform.lower().startswith("win"):
> # Ensure that we didn't just create a root-owned directory in the
> # user's HOME directory. That happens if this is being run under
> # sudo. If the SUDO_USER env. var (which contains the user that
> # invoked sudo) then we're running under sudo. If it doesn't
> # exist, we're not running under sudo.
> current_user = os.getenv("SUDO_USER")
> if current_user:
> subprocess.call(["chown", "-R", current_user, p])
Thanks
Philip
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