>>>>> On Mon, 2 Jun 2014, Ciaran McCreesh wrote:

> On Mon, 2 Jun 2014 11:42:07 +0200
> Ulrich Mueller <ulm@gentoo.org> wrote:
>> We say in Table 11.1 [3] that T and TMPDIR (and HOME) are legal in all
>> phases and must be "the location of a usable temporary directory". At
>> the same time, we say in the spec for pkg_* phases that they "must not
>> write to the filesystem" [4], or that they "must not write outside of
>> the directories specified by the ROOT and D environment variables" [5]
>> which effectively forbids writing to the ${T} etc. directories.

> The point of them pointing to a usable directory is just to avoid
> problems with things that break if the variable is empty or set to
> nonsense.

Yeah, but what is the point of restricting writes if the directory is
usable?

Ulrich