On Fri, Jun 11, 2010 at 7:42 PM, Jan Vornberger
Another stab at this: Indeed putting stuff into /tmp can be a security risk. I think one solution is to use something like mkdtemp to create a temporary directory in a secure way and pass that to GHC.
But according to this thread http://www.mail-archive.com/darcs-devel@darcs.net/msg03101.html even mkdtemp can be a problem in combination with tmp cleaners. On top of that, there doesn't seem to be an easily available mkdtemp implementation for Haskell. Maybe Unixutils on Hackage would fit the bill, but I guess we don't really want another package just for that.
Because of all the security headache, it seems to me that most people just give up on /tmp and instead put stuff into directories somewhere below the user's home directory.
So my suggestion: Redirect the intermediate files to ~/.xmonad/.ghc_temporary_outputdir and just delete that directory afterwards.
This achieves: * less ways for GHC to break (after a GHC upgrade), Joachim's initial reason for the patch * less clutter in ~/.xmonad, as mentioned before as well * should work for modular configs too * has non of the /tmp security concerns
Patch is attached! :-) Comments?
Regards, Jan
Well, that does look like it would work. (Didn't know we *had* a rm -rf in the libraries.) It's something of a hack to make our own temporary directory, but I doubt anyone will ever create such a dot-dir deliberately. If there really are no other downsides, then I guess this is worth applying. -- gwern