On Thursday, December 5, 2002, at 10:43 AM, William A. Rowe, Jr. wrote:
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.
This is precisely why the app needs to let the admin chose where to put temp files.
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.
Personally, I really get ticked off when programs go off and do weird things based on lame environment variables that I didn't explicitly set. We want to simplify and unify the interface to our programs, not cause unintended side-effects (or even worse, open up conduits for other holes to exploit).
I don't care if there's a default as long as it comes from the app. If the app wants to default to %TEMP% or $TMP or whatever, that's fine, let them shoot themselves in the foot, but don't hand them the gun.
-aaron
