Summary/Minutes for today's FESCo meeting (2014-11-12 at 18UTC)

[Michael Schwendt]

On Wed, 12 Nov 2014 11:53:32 -0700, Kevin Fenzi wrote:

> 18:03:04 <nirik> firefox folks removed their hack...
> 18:03:31 <nirik> so they use /tmp again in rawhide.
> 18:04:14 <kalev> that sounds like a regression
> 18:04:35 <nirik> regression?
> 18:04:46 <kalev> downloading multi gigabyte files into /tmp would probably easily fill it up
> 18:04:48 <mattdm> well, that's going to fill up with big downloads
> 18:04:59 <nirik> well, only if people don't say where to download them too...
> 18:05:05 <dgilmore> hola
> 18:05:07 <t8m> hi, sorry for being late
> 18:05:15 <nirik> it only uses that until the save dialog not answered.
> 18:05:46 <nirik> so I guess somone could save an iso and not answer the dialog and fill up space.

That would be a silly reason. Not answering the SaveAs ialog (which is
only displayed after changing the Preferences) it won't disappear, not
even when closing Firefox. You have to answer it, since closing it is
the same as clicking "Cancel" to delete the download.

IOW, you don't get the downloaded file, not even if the background
download completes. The file will still have its random temporary file
name that doesn't have anything in common with the final file name.


> 18:06:38 <kalev> [...], but the problem was the way they achieved it, by overriding the TMPDIR variable which incidentally then also override it in the env passed to other programs

Exactly. Originally, they did not respect an already set $TMPDIR, so you
could not even set $TMPDIR for all users and point it at quota-enabled
Temp storage, because /usr/bin/firefox would have started the download in
/var/tmp nevertheless.


The other problem, a $TMPDIR changing throughout the lifetime of a session,
also defeats the purpose of a system-wide configuration.

Hopefully gnome-terminal will be fixed eventually (and the same for any
other program that would not "see" a set env var).