Bug#977877: console-setup: setupcon --setup-dir ... generates temporary file name inside etc/console-setup directory

[Philip Hands <phil@hands.com>]

<Adithya.Balakumar@toshiba-tsip.com> writes:

> Hi Anton,
>
> Apologies for my late reply.
>
>> I don't feel myself competent to answer this question.
>
> You are listed as the maintainer of the console-setup package under packages.debian.org [1]. Hence the question. Is the package maintained by someone else now ?
> On that note, I have also proposed the same patch shared before in this mail thread as a MR [2] to the console-setup salsa repository as well. But no feedback for the MR yet.
>
> Any suggestions on how to proceed would be helpful.

So far I've failed to persuade this code to leave a mktemp generated
name in /etc (or elsewhere), so I'm obviously not running it in the
correct context. Please explain the circumstances under which this bug
can be reproduced.

Even so, I'm dubious about the way this is being fixed, because it seems
to me that a randomly named file seems unlikely to be used by anything
for its configuration, so I'm left wondering why it's being saved at all.

Have we actually established why the file is being saved?

If not, I really think we should do that before changing things, because
either it is currently being used for something, and we need to know
what for to be sure that switching to a fixed name is totally OK, or it
is not actually being used for anything, in which case the correct way
to fix the entropy issue would be to simply stop saving the file.

Cheers, Phil.
-- 
Philip Hands -- https://hands.com/~phil