[17061] in Athena Bugs
Re: empty netscape preferences
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (t. belton)
Mon Aug 16 12:54:44 1999
Date: Mon, 16 Aug 1999 12:51:13 -0400 (EDT)
From: "t. belton" <tbelton@MIT.EDU>
To: John Carr <jfc@MIT.EDU>
Cc: bugs@MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: <199908141345.JAA29102@m56-129-29.mit.edu>
Message-Id: <Pine.GSO.3.96L.990816124418.17098D-100000@iphigenia.mit.edu>
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The point about netscape creating a different file and then renaming after
creation is a good one, and I will change the 'netscape' script to do this
at the earliest opportunity.
However it worries me that you say the new preferences.js specified
~/.netscape/cache, as that is possibly the main thing we want to NOT do.
One of the primary reasons we customize preferences.js at all is so that
we can make sure the user caches into /var/tmp/.netscape-cache-USER/. This
has been the case through several versions of Netscape, and this is the
first I've heard of it not working.
I'm wondering if you are having some other unusual situation here, since
your preferences.js file should not be zero-length in the first place. Any
other information you can give me would be extremely helpful.
-Thanks,
Todd Belton
On Sat, 14 Aug 1999, John Carr wrote:
> This morning my .netscape/preferences.js was zero length so netscape
> installed a new one. It didn't warn me before doing so. The new
> preferences.js specified $HOME/.netscape/cache as the cache directory (it
> also turned on java and javascript which is extremely annoying but is also
> apparently considered a "feature"). I am using an 8.3 SGI.
>
> This is only a guess, but I suspect I logged out too soon after quitting
> netscape last night and lost tokens while netscape was writing the
> preferences file. Maybe netscape should write the new preferences under a
> different name and rename it into place to ensure that there is always a
> good version. Or it should warn loudly if the preferences file is empty.
> Or at a minimum, pick the correct local default for the cache.
