Hi, in bug #275140, I was made aware of a problem with the handling of tempfiles in tetex's maintainer scripts, and it seems to be a general problem. Basically, we do
tempfile=`mktemp` echo something > $tempfile and this will fail if the noclobber option is set in the executing shell, because after mktemp the $tempfile exists. It is easy to fix this: echo something >| $tempfile but both I and the bug submitter were puzzled that we didn't find any previous discussions about the topic. Obviously, noclobber is only rarely used (otherwise we would have gotten bugreports earlier), but I see no reason, neither in Policy nor in "common sense", why root shouldn't use it. On the other hand, this usage of mktemp has been the result of discussions on [EMAIL PROTECTED], and I'm quite sure to have seen it elsewhere. Is there anything I've missed? Do you think this needs to be clarified in Policy or the Developer's Reference? TIA, Frank -- Frank Küster Inst. f. Biochemie der Univ. Zürich Debian Developer
