[4596] in Athena Bugs
x11r4 xmh fails hard when folders unavailable
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (geer@crl.dec.com)
Thu Mar 22 10:02:01 1990
Date: Thu, 22 Mar 90 09:59:44 EST
From: geer@crl.dec.com
To: bugs@crl.dec.com
Cc: bugs@ATHENA.MIT.EDU, swick@ATHENA.MIT.EDU
WHAT'S WRONG
xmh (X11R4) fails catastrophically when it is unable to open
a folder.
REPEAT BY
% xmh &
% cd ~/Mail
% mv foo bar
[within xmh, try to open the folder foo]
xmh: Error in FOpenAndCheck(/udir/geer/Mail/foo/.xmhcache, r)
errno = 2; No such file or directory
exiting.
[4] Exit -1 xmh
DISCUSSION
This is simply inappropriate if for no other reason that one
of the most important features of xmh is the delayed commit
of message handling operations such as ``rmm'' or ``refile''.
A catastrophic failure will leave the user in a state of
arbitrary lost-work-and-confusion.
Although this was demonstrated with a folder rename, presumably
fileservice environments can produce failure-to-open for their
own reasons, that is to say reasons not so obviously dependent
on the user's inadvertent self-victimization.
--dan
