[17321] in Athena Bugs
Re: sgi 8.3.19: Adobe Acrobat
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (t. belton)
Wed Oct 27 13:27:17 1999
Date: Wed, 27 Oct 1999 13:27:09 -0400 (EDT)
From: "t. belton" <tbelton@MIT.EDU>
To: Dan Winship <danw@mit.edu>
cc: bugs@mit.edu
In-Reply-To: <199910271634.MAA136498@antharia.mit.edu>
Message-ID: <Pine.GSO.3.96L.991027131606.11158A-100000@iphigenia.mit.edu>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII
Except that it's not a change in the preferences file, it's a change in
the local .mailcap/.mime.types files, and the assumption is that if
you have a local .mailcap/.mime.types pair AT ALL, then you put those
settings in there deliberately and you don't want us to mess with
them. A local .mailcap/.mime.types should only be needed when you
need to override the global settings.
Admittedly, this has a flaw: For a long time, the standard Netscape config
didn't use global versions of those files, but instead wrote local copies.
This was wrong. Now there are probably lots of local .mailcap/.mime.types
sets which contain older, not-quite-functional settings, but the thing is,
we can't tell files which were put in there due to our stupidity from
files which are there because the user wants them there. (Some people
prefer to have the plugin be the default anyway, for example.)
There was never a point where we could say, "All right, we're starting
clean with a global set, from now on anyone who makes a local set must be
doing it on purpose."
So the question is, can I assume that if someone wants to run
netscape-fix, they want us to change this for them as well? Because my
first impulse is to say, "Hands off the mime types, that way lies
trouble."
-Todd
On Wed, 27 Oct 1999, Dan Winship wrote:
> [returning to bugs after a brief diversion into private mail]
>
> It looks like the problem is that the default was changed from "use
> acroread plugin" to "use acroread as an external viewer" because the
> plugin was known to be flaky, but this change was never made to
> peoples' existing Netscape prefs files. (I still had "use the plugin"
> in my prefs, and I know I ran fix-netscape when the latest netscape
> version came out.)
>
> So the problem can be fixed by making the wrapper fix peoples' prefs.
>
> -- Dan
>
