Re: Braindump: Can we get rid of the font-cache-group question?
On Sat, Jun 03, 2006 at 19:25 +0200, Florent Rougon wrote:
> Ralf Stubner <ralf.stubner@web.de> wrote:
> > openout_any = p
> > openin_any = a
> >
> > However, metafont does not semm to honour these settings. I still think
> > that working in a world writable directory is a bad idea. But a RFE for
>
> What's that? Request For Enhancement?
> Does someone work on a Metafont fork?...
No. I was extrapolating from my (very limited) knowledge of the TeX
source. TeX itself in the sense of tex.web does not have any routines
for interacting with the filesystem. That part is added via change
files, which makes sense when you want to write extremly portable
software. The above switsches are also implemented in this outer layer.
I am assuming that metafont has a similar outer layer, where one could
honour these switches, too.
However, I have just tested that these settings do not protect TeX
itself from such symlink attacks. It seems that only the name of link,
not the name of the file the link is pointing to, is checked.
I would say this is the right summary for the current situation:
[...]
> I'd stick to tell users not
> to compile their documents in world-writable directories...
And as long as people are smart enought to avaiod world-writable
directories, they are save wrt to symlink attacks ...
cheerio
ralf
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