At 11:55 AM 12/5/2002, Aaron Bannert wrote: >My main point here is that it is bad to use environment variables >for such things, and it's probably bad to have to run something >every time a temp dir is needed (like check permissions or search >a list of paths and stat() each one). I'd much rather see the apps >leave this decisions up to the users, for example, a simple config >directive in apache.
As a developer/administrator/user, I *really* get ticked off by those developers who don't respect my system-wide %TEMP%/%TMP% assignments. This isn't just a personal choice, since on locked down boxes or with apps installed on network filesystems, the cwd() is the very *worst* place to put tempfiles. That said, we also shouldn't force developers to give any thought to these things. If the proposed solution walks down the chain until we find the most appropriate directory with create/write/rm access, then that code needs not be duplicated by every app. Yes, envvars are good (as long as they correspond to each platform's well-known envvar names.) Let's not make apr counterintuitive for the real users/administrators. Bill
