[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/
