Setup Tools Permission Denied to write to /usr/local/share/applications/DroneCAN GUI Tool.desktop on Linux

[danapolsUM]

OS: Ubuntu 22.04.5

The removal of sudo in the Debian-based distribution installation causes the following error due to /usr/local/share/application needing sudo-level permissions to write to:

 Preparing metadata (pyproject.toml) ... error
  error: subprocess-exited-with-error
  
  × Preparing metadata (pyproject.toml) did not run successfully.
  │ exit code: 1
  ╰─> [8 lines of output]
      running dist_info
      creating /tmp/pip-modern-metadata-53uoiwmb/dronecan_gui_tool.egg-info
      writing manifest file '/tmp/pip-modern-metadata-53uoiwmb/dronecan_gui_tool.egg-info/SOURCES.txt'
      writing manifest file '/tmp/pip-modern-metadata-53uoiwmb/dronecan_gui_tool.egg-info/SOURCES.txt'
      running install_desktop
      /usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/setuptools/command/install.py:34: SetuptoolsDeprecationWarning: setup.py install is deprecated. Use build and pip and other standards-based tools.
        warnings.warn(
      error: [Errno 13] Permission denied: '/usr/local/share/applications/DroneCAN GUI Tool.desktop'
      [end of output]

A possible solution to not using sudo would be to instead store the .desktop file in ~/.local/share/applications. I looked into this a little bit with the install_freedesktop package currently being used, including trying to pass --user as a command line argument to the pip installation command, but it didn't seem to change anything. install_freedesktop appears to take arguments from distutills.command.install. The argument relevant to the installation destination of the .desktop file is install_data. However, this might cause the locations of other files to change as well, but I'm not sure.

[WebDust21]

Ha. Me too...same issue.

[WebDust21]

A crude bypass is to change the permissions on the destination folder. In my case, it's trying to write to /usr/local/share/applications...so I just enabled write permissions on that folder to include "others". By no means an ideal solution, but it DOES allow DroneCAN GUI to install.

Installed...oops, the shortcut that was causing that grief doesn't work...points to an invalid location ("/dronecan_gui_tool-1.2.28.data/scripts/dronecan_gui_tool")
Fortunately, "whereis dronecan_gui_tool" did pop out the correct answer: "dronecan_gui_tool: /home/[user]/.local/bin/dronecan_gui_tool". Clicking on it -> it runs.

Hey, I didn't say this was the right way around the issues ;-)