Improve error message when there's a colon in the project directory name

[minijackson]

Steps to reproduce:

• cargo new bla
• mv bla "bla:"
• cd "bla:"
• cargo test --verbose

Error:

error: failed to join search paths together: path segment contains separator `:`
Does $LD_LIBRARY_PATH have an unterminated quote character?

Caused by:
  failed to join path array: ["/tmp/bla:/target/debug/deps", "/home/minijackson/.rustup/toolchains/nightly-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu/lib"]

As LD_LIBRARY_PATH is a Unix thingy, I don't know if it is reproducible in Windows ;-)

Meta:

cargo 0.18.0-nightly (56083a3 2017-02-18)
release: 0.18.0
commit-hash: 56083a3362999695193a8f2252d17b0e4c32145e
commit-date: 2017-02-18

[alexcrichton]

IIRC a colon is an illegal character in a path on Windows, but we probably shouldn't fail like this on Unix.

[cyplo]

Would it be worth promoting this issue as beginner-friendly ?

[alexcrichton]

Ah no unfortunately I don't think this'll be easy to fix, all we can really do is probably provide a better error message :(

[stale]

As there hasn't been any activity here in over 6 months I've marked this as stale and if no further activity happens for 7 days I will close it.

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[stale]

As I didn't see any updates in 30 days I'm going to close this. Please see the previous comment for more information!

[grunweg]

I just ran into this issue:
while a search for "path segment contains separator" found this issue quickly, being told about the cause (colons in the directory name) would have made this easier.

[ehuss]

I can reopen, adding a better error message probably shouldn't be too difficult.

[mcepl]

This is a massive problem for me while building openSUSE packages, because our project names always include a colon. See building of python-maturin package:

maturin-0.11.2@kusansky$ env|grep LIB
PERL5LIB=/home/matej/.local/share/perl5
LIBVIRT_DEFAULT_URI=qemu:///system
RUBYLIB=/home/matej/.gem/local
maturin-0.11.2@kusansky$ pwd
/home/matej/build/devel:languages:python/python-maturin/maturin-0.11.2
maturin-0.11.2@kusansky$ cargo build
error: failed to join search paths together
Does $LD_LIBRARY_PATH have an unterminated quote character?

Caused by:
  failed to join path array: ["/home/matej/build/devel:languages:python/python-maturin/maturin-0.11.2/target/debug/deps", "/usr/lib"]

Caused by:
  path segment contains separator `:`
maturin-0.11.2@kusansky$

I don’t think I do anything illegal Unix-wise, but cargo build still hates me.

And yes, technically, I could build Rust packages in specifically non-colon-using directories, but it seems like me working around a broken tool.

[LenaWil]

Just wanted to mention that I also encountered this error on macOS. (which is an UNIX)

And I would like Cargo to warn for it when you call cargo init, which did in fact succeed.

[weihanglo]

Here are some steps to resolve part of this issue from cargo new and cargo init:

1. In src/cargo/ops/cargo_new.rs, create a new function to check if the path contains invalid character such as :.
2. Call the function inside both fn init(…) and fn new(…), and emit a warning if containing invalid characters. You can check other rules as references to word the message.
3. Add new integration tests for both cargo init and cargo new. Their styles of tests are a bit different. cargo init follows how UI tests are constructed, whereas cargo new uses functional tests style.

In addition, these error messages could be collapsed into one message, like:

error: failed to join paths from `${env}` together
    If you set `${env}` manually, check if it contains an unterminated quote character or path separators (usually `:` or `:`). Please avoid using them.
    Otherwise, check if any of path listed below contains those characters:
        "/projects/colon:x/target/debug/deps"
        "/home/user1/.rustup/toolchains/stable-x86_64-linux-unknown/lib"
        "/usr/local/lib"
        "/usr/lib"

[mcepl]

1. In `src/cargo/ops/cargo_new.rs`, create a new function to check if the path contains invalid character such as `:`.

What we wanted to emphasize here is that : is in fact NOT an invalid character on Unix™-like platforms.

[weihanglo]

@mcepl, you're absolutely correct. However, Cargo still cannot join paths that contain : (colon) on Unix-lie platforms. This is implemented here in the standard library, and also mentioned in the manpage of ld.so.

The items in the list are separated by either colons or semicolons, and there is no support for escaping either separator.

What I proposed doesn't devalue your needs. Just a warning to tell people “paths containing such characters might not be built for now” for general cases. I am not sure whether there is a workaround for your situation 😞. Could you share how you solve it these days?

[mcepl]

Could you share how you solve it these days?

Poorly. cp -r maturin-0.13.5 /tmp/ covers multitude of sins, but mostly our internal build command uses different (chrooted) filesystem where there are no colons in path.

[RyanAD]

@rustbot claim

[RyanAD]

I should have time to add a better error message over the next couple of weeks.