Bug#12240: patch

[Ian Jackson <ian@chiark.greenend.org.uk>]

The patch from Topi Miettinen should not be applied.  I agree with
Juan that this is a bug in the libc (though I also agree with James
Troup that he should probably not have reassigned the bug).

tmpfile() is documented in the glibc info file as:

 - Function: FILE * tmpfile (void)
     This function creates a temporary binary file for update mode, as
     if by calling `fopen' with mode `"wb+"'.  The file is deleted
     automatically when it is closed or when the program terminates.
     (On some other ANSI C systems the file may fail to be deleted if
     the program terminates abnormally).

Nowhere in this document does it say that tmpfile has the behaviour
that it's hardwired to use /tmp.  In fact, I think that such behaviour
is broken, and should be fixed.  I'm therefore going to reassign this
bug back to libc6.

I strongly suspect that the manpage for tmpfile was written with
reference to the implementation, rather than as a specification.  As
such it should not be considered canonical.  Even if it is to be
considered canonical, the behaviour documented in tmpfile(3) is still
broken, and so the documentation should be changed.  I'm therefore
also going to include manpages in the list of packages to which I'll
reassign the bug.

I'd be grateful if the manpages and/or libc maintainers would reassign
the bug to the other package when they have fixed their part of the
bug.

Thanks,
Ian.


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