Re: PSPP-BUG: Re: [bug #23344] Use /tmp for temporary files

[John Darrington]

On Tue, May 27, 2008 at 10:43:09AM +0200, unknown-1 wrote:
     Hi
     
          - in the current situation PSPPire leaves files behind in directories.
     > In my
     >     opinion this is not a clean behavier.
     >
     > Why?  Lot's of programs leave files in the current
     > directory. Compilers, editors, linkers ...
     >
     
     Sure, but this output is needed/expected after the porgram is ended. Maybe 
I
     am wrong, but as far as I can see there is no use for the files which stay
     behind now. They are only needed by the program during runtime as far as I
     found.

I guess there are some philosphocial issues here.  The way I've always
regarded pspp is that it takes a *.sps file as input and produces a
pspp.list  file as output.  So in this view, the output files are
absolutely essential.  Without them, the program's completely useless.

The pspp.jnl file, whilst not essential is a very useful file.  It
provides a means for the user to review their session.  It's only ever
designed for reading by humans, never by pspp.  So it's certainly not
a "temporary" file in this sense; it's pointless unless it persists
after the user's session is ended.

In the case of the gui, "pspp.list" has been renamed to "psppire.txt", and
as a courtesy to users, it pops up a window displaying that file.  In
either event, I would have thought that any user gui or cli, windows
or GNU would be rather annoyed if pspp{ire} deleted the output files when
the program exits.
     
     >     - if installed in a standard windows way, a standard user won't have
     > write
     >     access on the current directory and also not on /usr....
     >
     > I'm not an expert on windows, but doesn't a user have write access on
     > his/her home directory?
     >
     
     The default for a shortcut in windows is to set the current directory to 
the
     directory where to software is installed. The user should not have write
     access there.


How do windows ports of tools like TeX work? That produces a myriad
of "temporary" files: *.log *.aux *.dvi *.bbl *.toc ... I used 
MikTeX on Windoze years ago, and from what I remember it just
left them in the current directory with no problems.

J'

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