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Tasklist

FS#10492 - texlive-core putting temporary files under /root/.texmf-var

Attached to Project: Community Packages
Opened by Alberto Simoes (ambs) - Saturday, 24 May 2008, 21:44 GMT
Last edited by Francois Charette (Firmicus) - Saturday, 25 October 2008, 20:01 GMT
Task Type Feature Request
Category
Status Closed
Assigned To Francois Charette (Firmicus)
Architecture All
Severity Medium
Priority Normal
Reported Version 2007.08-2
Due in Version Undecided
Due Date Undecided
Percent Complete 100%
Votes 0
Private No

Details

Description:

Hello.
latex (kpathsea, and other tools) are creating temporary files under /root/.texmf-var and other similar directories. It would be great it these files were creates somewhere under /var in a world-writable directory.

As it is, if you want to run latex from a CGI script, you need to give permissions to everybody to write on that path.

Cheers
Alberto
This task depends upon

Closed by  Francois Charette (Firmicus)
Saturday, 25 October 2008, 20:01 GMT
Reason for closing:  Upstream
Additional comments about closing:  This is an upstream issue IMHO.
Also texlive is no longer in community :)
Comment by Francois Charette (Firmicus) - Monday, 02 June 2008, 20:00 GMT
Why should your CGI script be run as root? But perhaps I am not thinking enough. Could perhaps point me to another distro that implements this? I could try to do it with the TL2008 release.
Comment by Alberto Simoes (ambs) - Monday, 02 June 2008, 20:07 GMT
Hi

Unfortunately I am a little lost with that problem, but probably you can help me to find out exactly what is going on.
I just have a php script that calls pdflatex. The php script runs under the default apache configuration for Arch that (I think) is not run by root. And in fact, it doesn't, or it would have permissions to write under /root. Thus, probably a homeless user (like nobody) triggers this behaviour.

Cheers
Alberto
Comment by Anonymous Submitter - Thursday, 05 June 2008, 14:30 GMT
Can the desired behaviour be archieved by calling the -sys alternatives of the respective tools? Which tools do you exactly mean?
Comment by Alberto Simoes (ambs) - Thursday, 05 June 2008, 18:30 GMT
Not sure.
What I am calling is latex, dvips and then gs.
When calling latex it calls internal tools to create fonts. I think that those are the tools trying to write on that directory.

And by the way, what do you mean by the -sys alternatives?
Thanks
Alberto
Comment by Anonymous Submitter - Thursday, 05 June 2008, 21:41 GMT
I wonder why Latex and friends use /root/.texmf-var
That does not happen to me, on my system these stuff goes to /opt/texlive/texmf-var/.

There are tools like fmtutil and updmap that have a -sys variant (fmtutil-sys, updmap-sys).
I would like to suggest that you make a backup of /root/.texmf-var, delete it and do a updmap-sys as root. Afterwards do a latex-run on a document that is known as a font creating one. I think the internal stuff should go to /opt/texlive/texmf-var/ then. Having that tree world writable is less harmful than having /root world writable.

Or you can try to redefine the variable TEXMFSYSVAR in /opt/texlive/texmf/web2c/texmf.cnf to /var/texmf-var or the like.
Comment by Alberto Simoes (ambs) - Friday, 06 June 2008, 19:45 GMT
Hi,

Removed that directory. Run updmap-sys as root. When running latex, it tries to make fonts on $HOME/.texmf-var (using the apache user).

Accordingly with
/opt/texlive/texmf/web2c/texmf.cnf
the variable
TEXMFVAR = $HOME/.texmf-var
But it is weird that $HOME for apache is /root/

At the moment changed it to
TEXMFVAR = /tmp/.texmf-var

:-/
Cheers


Comment by Francois Charette (Firmicus) - Friday, 06 June 2008, 20:23 GMT
$TEXMFSYSVAR is set to /opt/texlive/texmf-var by default in texmf.cnf
and this should be used instead of $TEXMFVAR (= $HOME/.texmf-var) when the user is root.
To generate bitmap fonts the variable $VARTEXFONTS is used anyway, which is set by default to /var/tmp/texfonts.
Are you sure you don't have some texmf.cnf under $TEXMFLOCAL which changes those default settings?
Comment by Alberto Simoes (ambs) - Friday, 06 June 2008, 20:29 GMT
Hey.

Well, a find on the system for texmf.cnf returned no other path than
/opt/texlive/texmf/web2c/texmf.cnf

In any case, I am having this same problem in other Arch installation.

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