Re: [TopGit PATCH/RFC] Do not use mktemp

From: Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@uchicago.edu>
Date: Aug 12, 2008, 21:07 UTC
Message-ID: <Pine.GSO.4.62.0808121557290.24244@harper.uchicago.edu>
In-Reply-To: <20080812204433.GM10151@machine.or.cz>

Hi,

Petr Baudis wrote:

Show 6 quoted lines

> On Tue, Aug 12, 2008 at 01:14:27PM -0500, Jonathan Nieder wrote:
> > Old operating systems may not even have mktemp; less old
> > operating systems may have a mktemp which is not compatible with
> > the usual post-1.5 version.  Let's try to do without.
> 
>   can you give some concrete examples?

SunOS 5.8 has no mktemp (which is not so bad, because as you say, we could provide our own stub).

Mac OS X mktemp does not allow omitting the template argument but otherwise shouldn't be much of a problem. On Mac OS X (and old BSDs, too, presumably), "mktemp -t arg" treats arg as a prefix for a filename rather than a template for a filename, but that is just a cosmetic problem.

So thinking it through, perhaps we should do the following:
 - provide a simple mini-mktemp for users install to install themselves
   on old systems
 - always provide the template argument to mktemp

The arcane umask use would then go in that mini-mktemp which most people would not be using. I still would appreciate suggestions from any shell hackers on how to implement it properly (in particular, how to get random numbers that change more than once/second).

I'll work on a patch in a few hours when I get home. Thanks for the comments.

Jonathan