psychopyApp.py exits with no error message after startup when .psychopy2 directory is not owned by user

[fnielsen]

Starting psychopyApp.py it immediately exits with no error message. The problem seem to be the permission on the ~/.psychopy2 directory. Installation with root on Ubuntu makes it owned by root. When changing the owner and group of the directory psychopyApp.py starts up.

psychopyApp should have a better error message in this case.

This was for the present pip version.

[jeremygray]

I agree there should be a better error message, should be easy to add although might not be easy to get that error message back out to the user if the app exits immediately.

Just trying to understand what happened in your case: Did "installation as root" really create the ~/.psychopy2 directory? Here ~ should be root, yes? And if ~ is not root, I'm surprised that it knows which regular user is intended when installing as root.

[fnielsen]

Regarding your question 'Did "installation as root" really create the ~/.psychopy2 directory?' Apparently yes:

$ mv .psychopy2/ ~/tmp/.psychopy2
$ sudo pip uninstall psychopy
$ sudo pip install psychopy==1.82.1
$ ls -tral .psychopy2/
total 16
drwxr-xr-x 142 fnielsen fnielsen 12288 Dec 16 13:34 ..
drwxr-xr-x   2 root     root      4096 Dec 16 13:34 .

This is also an issue with PsychoPy-1.82.01.tar.gz

[fnielsen]

Should I make a new issue on the permission issue? As far as I see 300175b changes to a more informative error message, - not the installation issue.

[jeremygray]

Yes, please open a new issue and link to this one. Your shell output is useful. The bug is related to the fact that os.path.expanduser('~') is always the regular user, not root when using sudo. Should be easy to fix.

[fnielsen]

Thanks! As noted above I have created a new issue #1073