Fwd: $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR

[Lennart Poettering]

On Wed, 05.12.12 16:21, David Faure (faure at kde.org) wrote:

> 
> On Monday 03 December 2012 12:00:07 Thomas Kluyver wrote:
> > I'm thinking of adding support for $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR to PyXDG. However, I
> > want to check how to handle the case where it isn't set. From the spec:
> > 
> > *If $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR is not set applications should fall back to a
> > replacement directory with similar capabilities and print a warning
> > message. Applications should use this directory for communication and
> > synchronization purposes and should not place larger files in it, since it
> > might reside in runtime memory and cannot necessarily be swapped out to
> > disk.
> > 
> > *I've read a few discussions around Ubuntu's implementation of this, and
> > the consensus appears to be that there is no standard directory that will
> > reliably have the right properties. So, from 12.10, Ubuntu will ensure that
> > XDG_RUNTIME_DIR is set by default.
> > 
> > Therefore, my thinking is to provide no fallback, so if the environment
> > variable is not set, the Python variable will have a useless value too. Or,
> > if implemented as a function, it would raise an exception. Applications
> > that need to handle this case would then have to handle it themselves. Does
> > that sound reasonable?
> 
> Not very convenient, to expect apps to implement themselves a fallback.
> 
> In Qt, I implemented this:
> 
> if XDG_RUNTIME_DIR isn't set, mkdir /tmp/runtime-$USER,
> then ensure that it's owned by the user (otherwise bail out),
> then chmod to 0700 (and if that fails, bail out).

Well, this is a DoS. You cannot use a guessable name in /tmp.

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering - Red Hat, Inc.