py310-absl @1.4.0: metadata files are installed without world readable permissions

[snowflake (Dave Evans)]

These ports are building OK on the buildbots, but I've noticed in the last few day that there are many failures building them on my local machines, which run macOS 10.11.6 and 13.4.1.

Ports which are failing are py38-acme py39-automat py310-bcrypt py310-beautifulsoup4 py39-pikepdf. There are many more. I tried deleting all my Python ports and reinstalling them from source, but it made no difference. Not all ports fail.

Many of the failures report this error:

PermissionError: [Errno 13] Permission denied: '/opt/local/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.10/lib/python3.10/site-packages/absl_py-1.4.0-py3.10.egg-info/PKG-INFO'

The file site-packages/absl_py-1.4.0-py3.10.egg-info/PKG-INFO is owned by the py-absl port, which is not the port being built. There's no good reason why the build is trying to access this file during the build phase.

How to repeat:

sudo port clean py310-bcrypt
sudo port -s build py310-bcrypt

[snowflake (Dave Evans)]

Last 100 lines of the log

[ryandesign (Ryan Carsten Schmidt)]

Does the problem go away if you uninstall the py310-absl port?

[jmroot (Joshua Root)]

There is a long-standing requirement/bug (depending who you ask) of the pkg_resources module installed by setuptools that means that the metadata of all installed modules has to be readable by all users that may use pkg_resources. See e.g. #56279, #52687. Until and unless someone fixes pkg_resources to handle unexpected permissions better, all we can do is fix the permissions in all python module ports (and fortunately we want those files to be world readable anyway.)

[snowflake (Dave Evans)]

Replying to ryandesign:

Does the problem go away if you uninstall the py310-absl port?

Yes it does. I uninstalled all the py*-absl ports and it worked. I'm currently reinstalling all the ports I deleted and it's looking very promising. Results will be known in a couple of hours.

The reason I did not have a problem with py311-absl is that I never had it installed in the first place. The reason all the ports were building on the buildbots is that they always build with only the required ports installed.

I don't have a rational explanation as to why py*-absl was breaking the build, but I notice it was last updated 2023-07-30 14:16:47 +0100, which is about the time my builds started failing.

[jmroot (Joshua Root)]

In f0de87b17ab948f76be5fc81a4caca80778a2ab3/macports-ports (master):

py-absl: enable pep517 build

As well as the usual benefits, this avoids permissions issues with the
metadata files that can break pkg_resources.

Fixes: #67942