Description of problem:

The %pre script of texlive has the following:

rm -rf /usr/share/texlive/texmf-var
rm -rf /var/lib/texmf/*
for i in `find /home/* -type d -prune`; do
rm -rf $i/.texlive*
done

The piece about deleting from /home/USER is a problem.

We probably shouldn't be touching any files under the user's home directory to begin with for similar reasons as we don't allow packages to touch /srv.  /home/USER is modified by users in arbitrary ways so packages really should not be touching those directories at all.  I talked to some people here at flock who convinced me we should probably update the packaging guidelines to make this explicit.  Created a ticket for that: https://fedorahosted.org/fpc/ticket/451


I believe that you're doing this so that texlive upgrades can work out of the box (I saw that the .fmt files under the user's .texlive directory can cause tex to stop working if the previous version of texlive which generated those are different.)

The right thing to do here is probably to patch texlive to detect the outdated fmt files and let something(s) within texlive delete them if necessary.  Another options could be to modify the error message to tell users what the likely workaround to the problem they encounter would be.

If you'd rather wait for FPC to decide whether packages can touch files in /home/$USER before making a final decision, there are some ways to make the scriptlet somewhat safer.  Something like this:

for user in `find /home/* -type d -prune`; do
  if test -d "$user/.texlive/texmf-var/web2c/" ; then
    for fmt_file in `find "$user/.texlive/texmf-var/web2c/" -type f -name '*.fmt'` ; do
      # mv might be better in some cases but since these should be just caches
      # if we've detected the right sort of files anyhow,  I suppose this is best.
      rm -f  "$fmt_file"
    done
  fi
done

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
texlive-base-2013-5.20131226_r32488.fc20.noarch

How reproducible:
Always


Steps to Reproduce:
1. rpm -q --scripts texlive-base
2.
3.

Actual results:

See a %pre scriptlet that rm's files in a user's home dir

Expected results:

Do not see a scriptlet that rm's files in a user's home dir.

Additional info: