Bug#249597: texmf: Leaves spurious tempfiles around
On Thu, May 20, 2004 at 09:43:28AM +0200, Frank K?ster wrote:
> Jeroen van Wolffelaar <jeroen@wolffelaar.nl> wrote:
>
> > You're right it doesn't really obviously violate the FHS -- but it does
> > clutter the $TMPDIR, which by default isn't auto-cleaned.
>
> I think it is. /etc/rcS.d/S35mountall.sh does it on my woody and sid
> systems, and on the sid system I am sure I never changed anything
> there. It's the "bootclean" call right at the end. Why do you think it
> is not?
Yeah, on reboot, but some systems hardly reboot... like mine. I mean a
periodic cleaner. Sorry if that wasn't clear.
> > Note that the
> > FHS says that /tmp is for "temporary files", and the files here don't
> > fall in the category in my opinion (but it is a subtle).
> >
> > The purpose of this file is debugging, so in fact it is some kind of
> > logfile. IMHO, /var/log is thus the right place for these files, where
> > it could and should be arranged that those files are rotated away after
> > a suitable time.
>
> If nothing goes wrong, there is no point in keeping or rotating those
> files. This would clutter /var/log IMO, and make people think that
> there's anything important to it. And it would make the tetex packages
> even more complex, without any need as I see it.
Then why not if it succeeds, remove them from /tmp, only leaving them
there if something failed? That seems sensible to me.
> > initex and updmap can then be made to always log there
> > -- if you think that's useful in general (if it isn't, why is postinst
> > saving it then?).
>
> It is useful, bug if you run initex or updmap by hand, you'll get the
> output on the screen - if you like, you can redirect it to a file of
> your choice. But for sure it would be a bad idea to display it on the
> screen when they are run by a maintainer script. Furthermore, when you
> type "fmtutil -all" (it's not initex directly) and get an error, you
> know that you can just repeat it, and you'll get the same error messages
> and can safe them. Most people who get an error from postinst won't
> know which command it was that failed, so they can't easily reproduce
> it.
Ok, so on error, I agree it's sensible. But if all goes alright, it's
still cluttering IMHO.
> But we should probably put a note about those tempfiles into our
> reportbug template.
Then one (which is a good idea anyway) should choose a more verbose
filename, like tetex-bin.postinst.initex.RANDOMSTUFF, so reportbug can
reliably find them... It now took me a bit of research before I found
out which package kept putting random files in my /tmp...
--Jeroen
--
Jeroen van Wolffelaar
Jeroen@wolffelaar.nl (also for Jabber & MSN; ICQ: 33944357)
http://Jeroen.A-Eskwadraat.nl
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