[Pkg-privacy-maintainers] Bug#981817: onioncircuits: Permission denied: '/usr/local/lib/python3.7/dist-packages/psutil-5.7.2.dist-info'

[Jonathan Marquardt]

On Fri, Feb 05, 2021 at 12:08:49PM +0100, Clément Hermann wrote:
> On 04/02/2021 13:04, Jonathan Marquardt wrote:
> > On Thu, Feb 04, 2021 at 12:23:17PM +0100, Clément Hermann wrote:
> >> The error message reference stuff in /usr/local: this leads me to think
> >> some python libs where locally installed without using the package
> >> system. Can you check that please ? And maybe test in a vm for instance
> >> to check in a clean environment ?
> > 
> > I checked and you're right. This doesn't happen in a clean environment. I 
> > figured out what causes the issue. I have psutil installed using pip (pip3 
> > install psutil).
> > 
> > Is there a way to fix this? What even causes this? I need psutil to be 
> > installed for some other python programs.
> 
> I'm not sure in this particular case, the permission error suggests
> there is something on your setup that prevents the user running
> onioncircuits to access this file.
> 
> Usually when one mixes distribution packages and pip, one would use
> virtualenv or something similar to ensure what is run via pip modules is
> self-contained.
> 
> The thing is, I'm not sure why this error is on this module
> specifically, or that the module is pstutil is significant or it could
> be anyone.
> 
> in a clean Buster virtual machine, I tried to pip3 install psutil then
> install onioncircuits, and I didn't get this error (though I didn't try
> with a graphical environment running). There must be something else
> going on in your environment, maybe check the permissions on /usr/local
> and below, or try to go the virtualenv route, or if you can, install the
> python modules you need using Debian Packages (psutil has a recent
> version available through buster-backports for instance).

I played around a bit and found the following things:

Clean install with Debian 10 with Gnome: onioncircuits works.

After I run "pip3 install psutil" as root: onioncircuits doesn't work.

After I run "pip3 uninstall psutil" as root: It works again.

However I found out that it always works (on all of my systems) if I launch 
onionciruits with the command:

$ python3 /usr/bin/onionciruits

I have no idea why.