are they consistent. Though, all of that is irrelevant because allowing environment variables to define program behavior is totally bogus [on systems I care about].
Oh, I'm sure you've never set EDITOR, SHELL, or TERM.
Environment variables have always defined program behavior. If the program has an override (say TempDir directive for httpd), then cool. If not, we certainly should use whatever environment variables or default locations we can find. As a point of reference, both vim and emacs use TMPDIR. Depending upon the platform, they may also use /tmp or /var/tmp as fallbacks. -- justin
