Setting a sane default for DIST_MODULE_PATH

Archives Ansible Developer
1

Hi folks,

When installing the latest ansible (1.6.3) as a normal
“unprivileged” user in a virtualenv via pip, this error
is generated:

error: could not create ‘/usr/share/ansible’: Permission denied

Comments on a ticket not that ansible is a
“…systems application, not just a python library”::

https://github.com/ansible/ansible/issues/7450

I’d like to consider that there may be instances where
installing ansible in a more isolated environment would
be preferable to injecting ansible into the sys.prefix
or /usr/local/share.

I’d like to propose using ‘~/.ansible’ as a fallback.

In my environment, my preference is to leave the
system python alone, and use isolated virtualenv
setups for application installs. Ansible runs as
a non-privileged user, and I’d expect it to be able
to install without sudo/root privs.

I’m sure there are holes in my logic, but I’d suggest
a patch that sets DIST_MODULE_PATH up front,
similar to the changes here:

https://github.com/itd/ansible/blob/devel/lib/ansible/constants.py#L93

Lines 93-104 are the changes.

It uses the current default of ‘/usr/share/ansible/’
but if the dir doesn’t already exist, and
the user can’t create that dir, it assumes
~/.ansible/ as the default.

Okay. Tell me that it’s a bad idea and why, and I’ll gladly
eat crow.

Thanks,
Kurt

2

So Twitter was saying they had some patches that dealt with this using setuptools, I’m still open to them, and this would make user level installs in pip a thing.

I think I’d prefer that than the system trying another path if the thing wasn’t writeable, as that may happen if someone just forgets to sudo.

I don’t think I like ~/.ansible as that tends to imply a data file directory and if things were lurking there, people might have mixed versions of ansible and their library files.

Open to ideas.