New STIX startup fails when user has no write permissions to dbase folder(s) [CONFIRMED]

[ennosigaeus]

Short Description
Jana Kasparova reported having issues starting the IDL session with the latest version of our ground software. The details are given below.

My preliminary analysis (which needs to be confirmed) is that she has neither access to writing the downloaded ELUTs nor the privileges to save the file "stix_conf_version.txt."

Details

Dear Laszlo,
it seems $SSW/so/stix/dbase/detector/stix_conf_version.txt

is missing in the SSW tree.

On my PC an automated SSW update is run every morning. But, if I want to use SSW as a normal user (without root access who has writing access to the local SSW directory), I get these errors

  SOCK_GET_MAIN: No write access to directory - /usr/local/ssw/so/stix/dbase/detector
% READ_CSV: OPENR: Null filename not allowed.
% Execution halted at: STX_UPDATE_DET_CONFIG_FILES   99 
/usr/local/ssw/so/stix/idl/processing/spectrogram/stx_check_config_files.pro
%                      STX_UPDATE_ELUT    27 
/usr/local/ssw/so/stix/idl/processing/spectrogram/stx_check_config_files.pro
%                      STX_CHECK_CONFIG_FILES  171 
/usr/local/ssw/so/stix/idl/processing/spectrogram/stx_check_config_files.pro
%                      $MAIN$

The reason is that $SSW/so/stix/dbase/detector/stix_conf_version.txt
does not exists after the SSW update, therefore find_version_file variable in the $SSW/so/stix/idl/processing/spectrogram/stx_check_config_files.pro is a null string, run_update variable is set to 1 and

stx_update_elut, directory, verbose = verbose

fails because a normal user cannot write to that directory. If I run SSW as a root, the  $SSW/so/stix/dbase/detector/stix_conf_version.txt is created by

str2file, online_version, version_file

After that I can run SSW as a normal user. I'm wondering why the local version of $SSW/so/stix/dbase/detector/stix_conf_version.txt is deleted by the SSW update and/or why it is not created locally during the update.

For the automated update I use

${SSW}/gen/bin/ssw_batch go_update_ssw ${SSW}/ssw_update.log 1>/dev/null 
2>/dev/null

with export SSW_INSTR="hessi spex xray trace chianti stix desat"

Best regards, Jana

Screenshots
N/A

Files
The issue is most likely caused by calling the version checking in /usr/local/ssw/so/stix/idl/processing/spectrogram/stx_check_config_files.pro.

https://github.com/i4Ds/STIX-GSW/blob/d0a574445775a464c0b63929f73b8235a9e34dc6/stix/idl/processing/spectrogram/stx_check_config_files.pro#L143C5-L178

Example Code
One may be able to reproduce this issue (if confirmed) by denying write access to the dbase/detector folder and then starting the SSW environment.

Environment

• IDL Version: N/A
• STIX GSW Version: v0.6.0
• OS: Likely Linux or Mac

[ennosigaeus]

Jana confirmed that she has no write access to the folder(s).

[samaloney]

Ok we should be able to stop the crash fairly easily by adding some extra checks that the files exist, catch the write error e.g. on L99 as reported above. The bigger issue will be the lack of write access to the SSW install, we would have to store these files in a user directory