Bug#249597: texmf: Leaves spurious tempfiles around

[frank@kuesterei.ch (Frank Küster)]

Jeroen van Wolffelaar <jeroen@wolffelaar.nl> wrote:

>> > 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.

Are we really the only "stuff" that leaves something in /tmp? And if it
is considered necessary to clean it up on every boot, shouldn't there
also be a cron job for machines that rarely reboot?

>> 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...

That's a point. But I am still not convinced that it is a bug. What do
the other tetex maintainers think?

Regards, Frank

-- 
Frank Küster, Biozentrum der Univ. Basel
Abt. Biophysikalische Chemie