Hi,

The Coreutils maintainers have announced[0] that the next version of Coreutils 
will contain a `mktemp' binary.  This is good news for us as it means we can 
drop the mktemp package.  That package has a patch though, which creates a 
wrapper so that scripts that call the old-style `tempfile' binary will still 
work.  I offered[1] our patch to the Coreutils maintainers so that it could be 
incorporated upstream so that we wouldn't have to create/maintain a patch 
ourselves.  That offer was declined[2], as upstream don't want to be seen to 
encourage the continued use of `tempfile'.  This is eminently understandable, 
and I have to wonder if we shouldn't follow suit.

Does anyone know how widespread the use of `tempfile' is these days (for 
example, do _any_ LFS or BLFS packages call out to it)?  I think we've given 
plenty of time for any users of the `tempfile' binary to have been updated now, 
so any remaining users should be patched to use `mktemp'.  Neither the original 
mktemp maintainers or the new Coreutils maintainers seem interested in 
integrating our patch.  Now seems as good a time as any to reassess the 
suitability of the tempfile patch.

Regards,

Matt

[0] http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-coreutils/2007-10/msg00051.html
[1] http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-coreutils/2007-10/msg00133.html
[2] http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-coreutils/2007-10/msg00134.html

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