Don't create directories or files in system paths at runtime

[stkw0]

While trying to package PySDL3 for Gentoo I noticed that in the initialization routine it tries to create a directory and write docs at runtime to a system path. I would be glad if this could be fixed.

[Aermoss]

We have to use the lazy download method for now due to PEP517/PEP518 limitations but we are working on alternative methods to download binaries.

[stkw0]

The only thing that is downloaded it libsdl3 shared libraries, right? At least if I export SDL_DOC_GENERATOR=0 and SDL_BINARY_PATH=/usr/$(get_libdir) (where the system installs libsdl3) seems that pysdl3 doesn't complain and can correctly load the sdl3 libraries. Would it be possible to, before trying to download the shared libraries, to try to load them from the default path?

[Aermoss]

As mentioned in the documentation, if you set SDL_DISABLE_METADATA and SDL_FIND_BINARIES environment variables to "1", it will automatically load the binaries in SDL_BINARY_PATH and try to find the missing ones in the system libraries.

[stkw0]

Currently, to be able to package it, I was creating an /etc/env.d file which exports those variables so it doesn't try to create any directory in a system path nor download anything at runtime. But that approach might not work on systemd users. That's why I was curious if it was possible that, at first, the system-wide path is tried and if it fails it tries to download the libraries instead of the other way around.

Also, by only setting SDL_DISABLE_METADATAand SDL_FIND_BINARIES it still tries to create a directory in the system path, which produces the next error:

  File "/usr/lib/python3.12/site-packages/sdl3/__init__.py", line 157, in <module>
    if not os.path.exists(binaryPath): os.makedirs(binaryPath)
                                       ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
  File "<frozen os>", line 225, in makedirs
PermissionError: [Errno 13] Permission denied: '/usr/lib/python3.12/site-packages/sdl3/bin'

The workaround for that is to install an empty "bin" directory inside the site-packages, which is not very clean.