replace use of mkstemp in makeinfo.m with tmpnam/fopen ?

[John W. Eaton]

On 30-Jan-2009, John W. Eaton wrote:

| On 30-Jan-2009, Benjamin Lindner wrote:
| 
| | with the current develeopment sources, makeinfo.m utilizes the function 
| | mkstemp to create its temporary texinfo file.
| | However, mkstemp is not available on mingw32, so its call returns a file 
| | descriptor of -1 and subsequently, makeinfo.m fails. This means that 
| | help() and pring_usage() also fail.
| | 
| | Is is acceptable to replace the call to mkstemp() with a call to 
| | tmpnam() and fopen() instead?
| | This way, makeinfo.m does not use functions that may not be available on 
| | some OSes.
| | 
| | I have attached a proposal changeset.
| | This yields working makeinfo.m and thus also help() and print_usage() 
| | for a mingw32 platform
| 
| Would it maybe be better to use a similar method in mkstemp itself so
| that it can work on systems that don't have the mkstemp library
| function?  I think we would need a disclaimer in the documentation
| saying that on systems that don't have the mkstemp library function,
| Octave's mkstemp does not have the same security properties that
| mkstemp does.

Longer term, maybe we should be using functions from gnulib as
replacements for functions like mkstemp, tmpfile, etc.

jwe