Cargo fails to create any project on systems with an automounter

[samfux84]

Problem

Hi,

On our universities HPC cluster (with 4000+ users), the home directories are mounted via an automounter script in the path /cluster/home/$USER, which basically makes rust unusable:

sfux@eu-login-40:~$ module load stack/2024-06 rust/1.85.0
sfux@eu-login-40:~$ cargo new hello
    Creating binary (application) `hello` package
error: Failed to create package `hello` at `/cluster/home/sfux/hello`

Caused by:
  failed to read `/cluster/home/Cargo.toml`

Caused by:
  Permission denied (os error 13)
sfux@eu-login-40:~$

The automounter tries to mount the home directory of the non-existing user "Cargo.toml" and then returns a "permission denied" error, which cargo cannot handle.

Is there a way to prevent cargo from searching Cargo.toml everywhere in the path of the working directory? Or is there a way to have cargo handling the "Permission denied" without failing?

Any help is appreciated.

Best regards

Sam

[epage]

Is there a way to prevent cargo from searching Cargo.toml everywhere in the path of the working directory?

If you add a [workspace] to your package though that doesn't help with cargo new. We have #7871 and rust-lang/rfcs#3279 for a more general point on this.

Or is there a way to have cargo handling the "Permission denied" without failing?

The challenge with this is when the permission denied error is truly an error and would we should fail.

[RalfJung]

If you add a [workspace] to your package

IIUC, that would mean that every cluster user has to patch every Rust package they download from the web before they can build it. That's not really a solution...

[epage]

I never said it was sufficient. They asked for a way to prevent it and I gave one and listed future options for it.

[RalfJung]

a way to prevent it

"Educate thousands of users to use Rust in a non-standard way" doesn't fall into that category I would argue. If I were operating a cluster I'd be looking for something I can do to fix this for all my users.

[samfux84]

Hi,

a quick status update from our side. Our system administrator has now implemented an exception in the automounter script for Cargo.toml, such that it will return a "file not found" instead of "permission denied".

Now cargo works on the cluster.