error: failed to create database dir /home/martin/.cache/mu/xapian: Permission denied about mu HOT 9 CLOSED

I don't use snap, but yeah likely it stops you from writing outside some specific dirs. You can use a custom --muhome (or MUHOME); see manpage and mu4e-mu-home for mu4e (see the manual). Or you can just build mu yourself, and things should work with the defaults.

Good luck!

from mu.

Hmmm... Perhaps mu is already running? That could lock the database.

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Nothing in ps ax and there is no xapian directory. Is there an other way to look for?

And shouldn't there be another error message?

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Even reboot and logging in via tty and just running that mu command does not work. And I cannot see a permission problem. When I try it with sudo it works and tells me using directory: /root/snap/maildir-utils/629/.cache/mu/xapian so maybe it should use /home/martin/snap/... instead of my /home/martin/.cache/... ?

Maybe there is just a configuration mistake ant the snap is not allowed to write to ~/.cache ?

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Another error message?

Anyway, you can try to see if it works for some other dir:

mu init --muhome=/tmp/bla --maildir=~/Maildir

and you could try to run mu init with strace, to see if there's some underlying error.

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mu init --muhome=/home/martin/foo --maildir=~/Maildir works fine.
mu init --muhome=/home/martin/.foo --maildir=~/Maildir gives the error.

Using strace on both commands the main difference is that on the later with the error the line

recvmsg(3,` {msg_namelen=112}, 0)        = -1 EAGAIN (Resource temporarily unavailable)

But I don't really understand that.

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on the other hand --muhome="/home/martin/snap/maildir-utils/current/.cache/mu" works fine, but then I have to do that witch all the time. Shouldn't it be there by default?

Interestingly sudo -u martin mu init --maildir /home/martin/Maildir/ uses /home/martin/snap/maildir-utils/629/.cache/mu/xapian when using with the user martin. So what is wrong in my config?

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unset XDG_CACHE_HOME before running mu init seems to solve the problem now mu uses /home/martin/snap/maildir-utils/629/.cache/mu/xapian and even mu index works fine. But in emacs mu4e would not start seems it loads the variable from somewhere. :(

Now I need to find out what is setting this variable on startup or login and why.

Finally I found it just for people who want to know the anser:

I tried ubuntuDDE desktop, see https://itsfoss.com/install-deepin-ubuntu/
the "offical ppa" instructions will install the file /etc/profile.d/deepin-xdg-dir.sh which is setting the XDG_CACHE_HOME and that makes mu installed via snap to fail. The profile is not loaded when using sudo. I don't need deepin, was just curious so this is easy to fix.

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Thanks for your time!

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