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XDG_CONFIG_HOME failing silently caused confusion #6511
Description
I ran into a group who would have benefited from #5899. However, since that is not yet possible, they tried to set two different directories for different versions of Astropy to run in parallel on the same file system on the same cluster. Otherwise, they run into a problem of astropy.cfg getting corrupted by the parallel attempts to write it.
Despite instructions at http://astropy.readthedocs.io/en/latest/config/index.html that says, "... if you’ve set the environment variable XDG_CONFIG_HOME and the $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/astropy directory exists, it will instead be there," they set XDG_CONFIG_HOME that included the "astropy" sub-directory. As a result, the check for $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/astropy failed (because it was really looking for $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/astropy/astropy) and fell back silently to the default ~/.astropy/config, which caused a lot of confusion.
Suggestion: If XDG_CONFIG_HOME is defined but the desired directory is not found, raise an exception (too much?) or at least emit a warning.
Activity
saimn commentedon Sep 5, 2017
You mean
XDG_CONFIG_HOME=$HOME/.config/astropy? This would cause many software to look at their config inside this directory.The way I read this page is that you should set
XDG_CONFIG_HOME=$HOME/.configand create the$HOME/.config/astropydirectory (imo it should be created automatically in this case, but maybe it was not done to avoid breaking compatibility).pllim commentedon Sep 5, 2017
Not exactly. What actually happen was
export XDG_CONFIG_HOME=/some/nondefault/dir/astropybut the correct command should have been
export XDG_CONFIG_HOME=/some/nondefault/dirpllim commentedon Sep 5, 2017
That would help too. Not creating that first also caused silent default-ing and confusion.
pllim commentedon Sep 5, 2017
Sure. But that was not the source of the problem reported.
saimn commentedon Sep 5, 2017
Exactly
No indeed, but that was just to explain the effect of changing
XDG_CONFIG_HOME.pllim commentedon Sep 5, 2017
For more background, the affected party was a very specific pipeline workhorse. So, other software config files are not really an issue there. Setting
XDG_CONFIG_HOMEcorrectly (without the "astropy" in string) did solve the problem but setting it incorrectly initially caused a lot of confusion due to the lack of verbosity.pllim commentedon Mar 30, 2020
If #10090 is accepted, then this won't really be an issue anymore because there will be a workaround.