[tex-live] TeX Live 2008 testing - problems downloading

Siep Kroonenberg siepo at cybercomm.nl
Mon Jun 30 10:59:00 CEST 2008


On Mon, Jun 30, 2008 at 12:53:20AM +0200, Reinhard Kotucha wrote:
> Norbert Preining writes:
>  > On So, 29 Jun 2008, Karl Berry wrote:
>  > >     I'm surprised that perl doesn't respect TMPDIR.
>  > > 
>  > > It's not about perl, it is about our code.  And yes, it should use
>  > > TMPDIR rather than hardwiring /tmp.
>  > 
>  > It should do it ...
>  > 
>  > code from TLUtils.pm:
>  > sub get_system_tmpdir {
>  >   my $systmp=0;
>  >   $systmp||=getenv 'TMPDIR';
>  >   $systmp||=getenv 'TMP';
>  >   $systmp||=getenv 'TEMP';
>  >   $systmp||='/tmp';
>  >   return "$systmp";
>  > }
>  > 
>  > SO it tries first TMPDIR, then TMP, then TEMP, then /tmp ...
> 
> Hmm, when I wrote this code I hoped that it is never needed and system
> tmp files can be avoided, at least on Windows.  The reason is that
> TEMP on Windows contains USERPROFILE.  The latter contains the name of
> the user, and last year we got a bug report from a Chinese who had
> Chinese characters in USERPROFILE.
> 
> The problem is that Perl needs forward slashes as directory separators
> and converting \ to / works reliably with ASCII or UTF-8 only.
> 
> Hans told me that there is another temp dir on Windows which is
> writable by everybody: %SYSTEMROOT%/temp (c:/windows/temp).  This
> would avoid the problems but someone has to confirm that it exists and
> is writable by everybody on Vista too.

TeXLive::TLWinGoo::global_tmpdir. I did some testing: under Vista it
isn't even globally readable for a non-administrator. Neither is it
readable a domain- (=non-local) user on my XP roaming-profile
virtual machine.

However, TEMP and TMP contain short names. So TEMP and TMP are
probably ok, unless they have been user-modified.

-- 
Siep Kroonenberg


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