[Octave-bug-tracker] [bug #42581] "Permission denied" when using "run-octave --no-gui-libs" from non-builder account

[Mike Miller]

Update of bug #42581 (project octave):

                  Status:                    None => Invalid                
             Open/Closed:                    Open => Closed                 

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Follow-up Comment #1:

Thanks for your bug report. However, this looks to me like entirely expected
behavior of Autotools-Libtool-based builds, not a bug in Octave's build
process, and there are easy workarounds to achieve what you want.

First some background. The lt-octave-cli program is a libtool-private linked
copy of octave-cli, made so that it will run and find the Octave shared
libraries in the build tree. This program needs to be linked only once, and
once it exists you should be able to run it as any user that has read and
execute permissions on the directories and files. The error message you are
seeing indicates that this executable does not exist yet and the user who is
trying to run octave-cli does not have write permission to create it. This
seems consistent with how you say you are building and running Octave.

What you probably did in the past was to execute either "run-octave" or "make
check" as root (or whatever user did the build), this would have created the
lt-octave-cli program as a side effect, and you would not have seen this
error. If you neglected to do that this time, the error is absolutely
correct.

So that's one workaround, simply run "make check" or "run-octave" once as the
user who owns the build tree, and you should be good from there.

And of course the better solution is to do an actual "make install" somewhere
on your system that all users can access. Any particular reason you are not
doing that?

Note that running out of the build tree may work for many tests but is *not*
suitable nor supported for a fully functioning Octave environment. As one
example, mkoctfile is not expected to work in the build tree.

And nowhere is it recommended to build Octave as one user and run it out of
the same build tree as a different user. Closing as invalid, but of course
feel free to reply or comment for further clarification or if I'm missing
something.

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