Re: [matplotlib-devel] Add some caching to texmanager.py?

[Fernando P. <Fer...@co...>]

Nicholas Young wrote:
> On Wed, 2005-06-22 at 11:45 -0600, Fernando Perez wrote:
> 
>>os.environ['TEXMFOUTPUT'] = '/some/path'
> 
> 
> According to the online docs
> (http://docs.python.org/lib/os-procinfo.html) setting os.environ isn't
> safe/available for all platforms.  You can use the subprocess module to
> set the environment of a subprocess under python 2.4 but I don't think
> there's a simple way to do this and capture the output for earlier
> versions.

Well, after reading that I get that os.environ _is_ writable everywhere, it's 
just that it may leak memory in OSX/BSD.  What's not always available is the 
putenv() call, but python will find its way around it if needed.

Since this would be a once-only call, I think that leaking a few bytes is an 
acceptable price to pay to prevent a crash if the user happens to be 
positioned on a non-writable dir.

Cheers,

f