VSzA techblog

LibreOffice 4.0 got released on 7^th February, and since it offered improved OOXML interoperability, I immediately downloaded and installed it on my laptop. It worked quite well, but after the next boot, it just flashed the window for a tenth of a second, and displayed the following output on the console.

Fatal Python error: Py_Initialize: Unable to get the locale encoding
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<frozen importlib._bootstrap>", line 1558, in _find_and_load
  File "<frozen importlib._bootstrap>", line 1525, in _find_and_load_unlocked
  File "<frozen importlib._bootstrap>", line 586, in _check_name_wrapper
  File "<frozen importlib._bootstrap>", line 1023, in load_module
  File "<frozen importlib._bootstrap>", line 1004, in load_module
  File "<frozen importlib._bootstrap>", line 562, in module_for_loader_wrapper
  File "<frozen importlib._bootstrap>", line 854, in _load_module
  File "<frozen importlib._bootstrap>", line 990, in get_code
  File "<frozen importlib._bootstrap>", line 1051, in _cache_bytecode
  File "<frozen importlib._bootstrap>", line 1065, in set_data
OSError: [Errno 30] Read-only file system: '/usr/local/opt/libreoffice4.0/program/../program/python-core-3.3.0/lib/encodings/__pycache__'

I symlinked /opt to /usr/local/opt, and for many reasons (including faster boot, storing /usr on an SSD) I mount /usr in read-only mode by default, and use the following snippet in /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/12remount to do the magic upon system upgrade and software installs.

DPkg
{
    Pre-Invoke {"mount -o remount,rw /usr && mount -o remount,exec /var && mount -o remount,exec /tmp";};
    Post-Invoke {"mount -o remount,ro /usr ; mount -o remount,noexec /var && mount -o remount,noexec /tmp";};
}

It seems that LibreOffice 4.0 tries to put compiled Python objects into a persistent cache, and since it resides on a read-only filesystem, it cannot even create the __pycache__ directories needed for that. My workaround is the following shell script that needs to be ran just once, and works quite well by letting LibreOffice put its cached pyc files into /tmp.

#!/bin/sh
mount /usr -o rw,remount
find /opt/libreoffice4.0/program/python-core-3.3.0/lib -type d \
    -exec ln -s /tmp {}/__pycache__ \;
mount /usr -o ro,remount