Hi Christian,

I know nothing about Ren'Py and TFD but it seems there's an
approachable workaround - you can modify the package to patch
launcher/game/choose_directory.rpy to have a suitable directory used.

First, I'd suggest you look at how some existing packages use the
`substitute*` macro[1]. Then, look at how packages are defined[2] and
how to *inherit* from another package[3].

Once you grasp a bit of it, you should be able to define your own
variant of the Ren'Py package. One without the bug.

I realize it's probably a bit discouraging to come to a new distro and
find out you need to learn packaging to utilize it. Indeed, I wish I
had more time to prepare such modified package for you. Yet, honestly,
Guix is a geeky package manager - you can only benefit from its
super-powers once you're yourself Guix geek ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Good luck :)

Wojtek

P.S. If TFD are really free as in freedom, it'd be cool to have the
package fixed to actually use them. But that might be more involving
than merely patching a path...

[1] https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix.git/tree/gnu/packages/game-development.scm?id=779757047997d315d899b40c199be3709115cce4#n171
[2] https://guix.gnu.org/manual/en/html_node/Defining-Packages.html#Defining-Packages
[3] https://guix.gnu.org/en/cookbook/en/guix-cookbook.html#Inheritance


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On Thu, 27 Oct 2022 06:58:58 +0000
Christian Gelinek <christian.gelinek@mailbox.org> wrote:

> Dear Guix community,
> 
> I couldn't get the GUI `renpy-launcher` GUI to do anything useful.  It 
> says "The selected projects directory is not writable" for any 
> meaningful action I attempted.  Under "preferences" -> General, there is 
> a Projects Directory setting which (for me) displays as "Not Set".  
> Clicking that again shows the above error.
> 
> I'm new to Ren'Py (and GuixSD), so there may be a way of specifying this 
> directory on the command line or via a config file somewhere, but I 
> haven't found it.
> 
> Looking at the code at 
> https://github.com/renpy/renpy/blob/master/launcher/game/choose_directory.rpy 
> it seems that it tries to import the `_renpytfd` Python package, which - 
> if successful - would be used to display a `selectFolderDialog`.  
> Otherwise, it would try to use the parent directory and if that fails, 
> the directory specified in config.renpy_base, which is set to the empty 
> string. Interestingly the empty string should resolve to the current 
> directory, but that doesn't seem to be the case in my `renpy-launcher` 
> context.
> 
> Another thing I found is that `_renpytfd` is being removed from the 
> renpy package in 
> https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix.git/tree/gnu/packages/game-development.scm#n1347 
> which probably is the reason for why I can't set the path in the GUI.  
> The comment says "drop _renpytfd, as there are missing sources" but 
> https://sourceforge.net/projects/tinyfiledialogs/files/ seems to 
> disagree with that.  Additionally, there is a Guix package 
> rust-tinyfiledialogs which I expect to also (at least indirectly) depend 
> on tinyfiledialogs, which is not a package.
> 
> Where to go from here?
> 
>