bug#17528: [mktemp] Not a bug.... a feature proposal

[Eric Blake]

tag 17528 notabug
thanks

On 05/19/2014 07:27 AM, Matthieu Fronton wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> First i'd like to apologize because this message is about for a new feature
> proposal, not a bug.
> I send it to the only mail I have found in the man page. Sorry for that.

One person's feature request is another person's bug for missing
functionality, so you mailed the correct place.

> 
> I just wanted to propose to add the last generate temporary file's full path
> in a predefined environment variable.

Umm, how do you propose to do that?  Child processes cannot modify the
environment of the parent.  The only way to invoke mktemp is by spawning
a child process - but that means that there is no way for mktemp to
modify a predefined environment variable.  That is, unless you are
proposing to add a new shell builtin (so that a child process is not
spawned), but then your patch would need to be against the shell (we
don't maintain the shell here in coreutils).

> I can create a patch or send a pull request but I'll first need to know
> where your source code is and how can we contribute, even for these kind of
> tiny little feature.

You are welcome to try and write a patch, but it sounds fundamentally
futile based on how environment variables work.  As such, I'm going to
close this request as not a bug, but feel free to continue replying on
this thread if you have more questions or comments.

Read this for more ideas about contributing other patches:
http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/coreutils.git/tree/HACKING

-- 
Eric Blake   eblake redhat com    +1-919-301-3266
Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org

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