Bug#294197: upgrading tetex creates ls-R in user homedir if sudo is used
Hallo Uwe,
I wrote:
> >> Hm. unsetting HOME in postinst's environment could relieve you from this
> >> inconvenience. But I don't know which other effects it could have.
> > In my opinon, a {post,pre}{install,remove} script should never do
> > anything in $HOME, be it mine or root's and regardless of having called
> > texhash/mktexlsr or not.
>
> You're right, and therefore everything that goes amiss when HOME is
> unset is buggy by itself. I don't expect much of this in teTeX,
> therefore I have fixed this in our CVS.
Unfortunately it does not work. There is no way to prevent mktexlsr
from updating HOMETEXMF/ls-R if the directory exists, except if we add a
Debian-specific option for this. Unsetting $HOME only has the effect
that it tries /texmf instead, which is probably even worse.
I am not sure that patching mktexlsr to leave out homedirectories if
called by root, or such, is a good idea. First of all, it doesn't make
much sense to make it behave like this only if a certain option (say,
--nohome) is given: While it would be easy to use this option in the
maintainer scripts of teTeX, we would have a hard time finding all other
maintainer scripts that use mktexlsr, and convince the maintainers to
switch.
But if we make this the default behavior, I'm sure we get other
complaints, e.g. on systems where people want to use sudo and
to be able to update /usr/local/share/texmf/ls-R and their
$HOME/texmf/ls-R with the same command.
Regards, Frank
--
Frank Küster
Inst. f. Biochemie der Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer
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