permission denied to ~/.nimble/pkgs is fatal

[disruptek]

I cannot use commands such as test, dump, check, doc, etc. when Nimble doesn't have permission to ~/.nimble/pkgs.

[disruptek]

Ditto $TMPDIR.

[genotrance]

I just set ~/.nimble/pkgs to be owned by root and was able to run all the above commands as a regular user.

$TMPDIR is a different story though since nimblecache lives there.

[disruptek]

How is that useful?

[genotrance]

To test whether ~/.nimble/pkgs being inaccessible makes any difference to Nimble, and it did not. Not for the commands you mentioned at least. An error snippet would help to figure out what's going on.

[disruptek]

Here's a reproduction that demonstrates my problem:

$ chmod 0 ~/.nimble
$ nimble dump
oserr.nim(94)            raiseOSError
Error: unhandled exception: Permission denied
Additional info: "/home/adavidoff/.nimble/pkgs" [OSError]
$ nimble test
oserr.nim(94)            raiseOSError
Error: unhandled exception: Permission denied
Additional info: "/home/adavidoff/.nimble/pkgs" [OSError]

When I cannot control the behavior of software I do not trust, I do not use that software.

[genotrance]

PR #768 will fix the issue around the pkgs directory. nimble needs to get package info for dependencies and currently copies a nims file in each dep to get pkg info. The PR will no longer need files to be copied around.

However, we still rely on $TMPDIR for nimblecache so that has no real fix.

[Araq]

When I cannot control the behavior of software I do not trust, I do not use that software.

Sure but forbidding Nimble access to ~/.nimble/pkgs is deliberately breaking Nimble. "Won'f fix"? What should Nimble do instead? Continue like nothing happened?

[disruptek]

Either Nimble is intended to require read access to ~/.nimble or it isn't.

Since you asked, I think nimble dump should work regardless of whether Nimble can read/write my ~/.nimble. Ditto other operations on the local project, such as test, check, and so on.

I am fine with closing this ticket if this is the intended behavior; I just felt that the error message suggested otherwise.