[Frank, you seem to have a wrong mail alias for me somewhere;
[EMAIL PROTECTED] is no longer in use, but that's where your cc: was
sent.]

On Wed, Oct 04, 2006 at 09:32:16AM +0200, Frank Küster wrote:
> > However, he also agrees with me that every package affected by this bug is
> > violating policy in its package builds: a package's clean target has to undo
> > everything done by the build and binary targets, which is not possible if
> > it's leaving cache files around on the system.

> I agree with you, and I'm also glad that you came up with a proposal for
> a good solution.  

> However, I'd like to point out that this problem is not special to TeX.
> Many programs create ~/.progname directories when run for the first time
> - and these directories contain configuration options which might cause
> trouble, since they are not updated or subject to dpkg conffile
> questions when the package changes configuration options.  It might be a
> good thing to require such tools to have a commandline switch or obey a
> commandline variable that prevents this.  Alternatively, HOME could be
> set to the temporary build directory, so that everything happens there.

Yes, that's true.  Setting $HOME to something explicitly nuked by the clean
target might be a good general solution.  In practice, there are few tools
that have broken buildd chroots in the manner that tex seems to have here.

> > the next best
> > option is for the tex maintainers to provide documentation to package
> > maintainers who build-depend on tex for using a local, in-tree font cache
> > that they can wipe out as part of their clean target, leaving the rest of
> > the system unaffected.

> That's actually a good idea, yes.  Package maintainers have to set
> TEXMFVAR so something inside the current directory.  Is the Makefile
> variable $(CURDIR) safe for this?

For identifying the current directory, yes.  TEXMFVAR should be a subdir, of
course. :)

-- 
Steve Langasek                   Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
Debian Developer                   to set it on, and I can move the world.
[EMAIL PROTECTED]                                   http://www.debian.org/

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