SandboxViolation on EasyInstall

[mikkokotila]

I got the following error message from a Travis build referencing back to matplotlib. Any idea what this is / what do with this?

Installed /home/travis/virtualenv/python3.5.6/lib/python3.5/site-packages/Dedomena-0.0.6-py3.5.egg
Processing dependencies for Dedomena==0.0.6
Searching for twintel
Reading https://pypi.org/simple/twintel/
Downloading https://files.pythonhosted.org/packages/3a/f1/de2d538a8ffb55362f1a8710dc921035b32c53ee7a20cda789d19c95fe64/twintel-1.3.tar.gz#sha256=09f88f956c8cf618a34801a811bdac10c6cc5943862ceb3708bbf2f298a16b54
Best match: twintel 1.3
Processing twintel-1.3.tar.gz
Writing /tmp/easy_install-3t1yzx2q/twintel-1.3/setup.cfg
Running twintel-1.3/setup.py -q bdist_egg --dist-dir /tmp/easy_install-3t1yzx2q/twintel-1.3/egg-dist-tmp-au2twq58
error: SandboxViolation: mkdir('/home/travis/.config/matplotlib', 511) {}
The package setup script has attempted to modify files on your system
that are not within the EasyInstall build area, and has been aborted.
This package cannot be safely installed by EasyInstall, and may not
support alternate installation locations even if you run its setup
script by hand.  Please inform the package's author and the EasyInstall
maintainers to find out if a fix or workaround is available.
The command "python setup.py install" failed and exited with 1 during .
Your build has been stopped.

[dstansby]

It looks like the problem comes when installing the twintel package, and not Matplotlib here. Exactly what command did you run to get the above output?

[QuLogic]

This is a bug during the install of twintel and the weird things it's trying to do in its setup.py.

[mikkokotila]

Thanks. It's strange that the error message referred to matplotlib:

error: SandboxViolation: mkdir('/home/travis/.config/matplotlib', 511) {}

[tacaswell]

This does seem to actually be us (and twintel is trying to install a dependency of which Matplotlib is a dependency)

matplotlib/lib/matplotlib/__init__.py

Lines 564 to 567 in e34c6ef

	try:
	configdir.mkdir(parents=True, exist_ok=True)
	except OSError:
	pass

on master

matplotlib/lib/matplotlib/__init__.py

Lines 649 to 660 in 81e9ace

	def _get_config_or_cache_dir(xdg_base):
	from matplotlib.cbook import mkdirs
	configdir = os.environ.get('MPLCONFIGDIR')
	if configdir is not None:
	configdir = os.path.abspath(configdir)
	if not os.path.exists(configdir):
	mkdirs(configdir)
	if not _is_writable_dir(configdir):
	return _create_tmp_config_dir()
	return configdir

on 2.2.x but it looks like we have always been doing this so it is not clear to me why this is just coming up now.

@mikkokotila Can you reproduce this locally or get anymore debugging information out of your CI?

[QuLogic]

This is not a new error. It's existed since twintel was added to dedomena. Setuptools is just better at sandboxing now.

[anntzer]

I agree with @QuLogic's analysis. mikkokotila/twintel#2 also likely fixed the issue.