Hi Ryan, Steve Langasek <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On Sat, Sep 30, 2006 at 11:31:14AM +0200, Frank Küster wrote: >> > But if the package build requires access to $HOME/.texmf-var, that's still >> > a >> > bug that should be fixed; > >> No it doesn't require that. Only if there is a $HOME directory, and it >> is writable, then it is used. Otherwise /tmp/texfonts is used >> instead. > > I've chatted with Ryan Murray about this, who maintains the buildds for the > three archs in question. He's agreed to look into removing /home/buildd on > these buildds when he has a chance. Thank you. You would have saved me a second of horror if you'd put here what you've written at the end of your mail, namely that Ryan has examined that directory: I was about to cry out "don't do that". > 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. > Ryan suggests that not caching fonts at all would be a good solution to > this. Since AIUI it is a design constraint of tex to cache these fonts as > intermediary output from one tool used as input for another, Yes, that's a design constraint, and won't change in the next couple of years. > 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? > Had this been in place for whatever packages are generating documentation in > their binary target (instead of their build target), the autobuilders never > would have ended up with root-owned directories under > /home/buildd/.texmf-var (which Ryan confirms is the case). Yes, that must be the cause. Thanks for debugging, and in particular for the good suggestion, Frank -- Frank Küster Single Molecule Spectroscopy, Protein Folding @ Inst. f. Biochemie, Univ. Zürich Debian Developer (teTeX/TeXLive)
