Thiemo Seufer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> No, or I do not understand what you mean. > > I meant the the earlier security bug you mentioned. To me, the solution > for the earlier bug as well as the current one looks like keeping the > font cache in /var but maintaining it via a mktexmf user.
That would be a clean solution, which we already considered. However, it requires a daemon (running as the mktexmf user) for the interaction with the ordinary user who requests a non-yet existing font file to be generated. This is probably unacceptable for upstream, because a web2c TeX is supposed to run on other systems, too, especially Windows, where we have only a very small developer base (but many users). There's a third possibility which Julian Gilbey came up with, but I don't know whether anything written exists about that except a sketch on a paper napkin he showed me. And it's also a long-term solution to be implemented upstream. So far, however, I have not seen any problem with the current setup: The font cache is in the users' home directories, can be configured to be in a system-wide, group-writable directory, and as a fallback, if the home directories are not writable, is put into /tmp/texfonts. As I already said in my other mail, that works with an unlimited number of users. Regards, Frank -- Frank Küster Single Molecule Spectroscopy, Protein Folding @ Inst. f. Biochemie, Univ. Zürich Debian Developer (teTeX/TeXLive)
