Article 31303 of dec.notes.networking.internet_tools:
Title: NCSA Mosaic V2.7 beta 4
Reply Title: (none)

.14> Mosaic*BackupDataFiles:                 True

Sigh.  This was a can of worms, although easy to find and "fix".  There
are three problems here.  In random order:

1) Here's yet another case of SURPRISE ! due to too many !(@&* knobs.  I
   can offer my apologies for not finding this one before putting the images
   up, but there's simply no way that I'm going to find all of these.

2) NCSA got a bit better about their code, and is using more and more
   "system independent" programming.  What that means in this case is that they
   put together a "my_sterrror" function to handle error number to error string
   conversion for all systems.  Not bad, not bad.  However, when they plugged
   it all back into the code, they didn't always account for the fact that
   in some cases they return NULL.  That's the actual, immediate cause of
   this crash.  I've fixed this particular problem.

3) The start of this thread was file naming.  Mosaic uses a few files, and
   many of these are hidden on UNIX systems by having a name that starts
   with a ".".  For VMS, I removed most of these initial dots for a few
   reasons.  First, null file names are a bit of a pain, and secondly, a
   seperate extension is often added to the name.  That would lead to 2 "."s
   in a name and trouble.  Unfortunately, that's what happened here.  2 dots
   led to a bad name, and a failure in fopen.  That tried to obtain the error
   string for printing, which returned a NULL, which ...

The wordy response to your crash is above.  I'm now going to delve a little more
into the file naming, which has always been something of an irritation and
on which I've never spent much time.

Some of the original file names are (with the VMS version on the right):

.mosaic-global-history			mosaic.global-history
.mosaic-x-history			mosaic.x-history
.mosaic-hotlist-default			mosaic-hotlist-default
.mosaic-personal-annotations		mosaic-personal-annotations
/usr/local/lib/mosaic/documents.menu	documents.menu
.mime.types				mime.types
.mailcap				mailcap.
/usr/local/lib/mosaic/no_proxy		mosaic-proxy.
/usr/local/lib/mosaic/proxy		mosaic-no_proxy.
.mosaiccciport				mosaiccciport.
.mosaic-user-defs			mosaic.user-defs
.mosaicpid				mosaic.pid
.mosaic-spoof-agents			mosaic.spoof-agents
.mosaic-newsrc-%s			mosaic-newsrc-%s

You'll notice that there are two "styles".  Replace the leading "." with
nothing (or a trailing "."), and turn .mosaic-foo-bar into mosaic.foo-bar.
There is little consistency in the names.

Simply removing the leading dash works (exceptions in a minute) most of the
time.  If you're lazy and want all mosaic files, you'll need to look for
mosaic*.*.   The second form of replacement places all files into a nice
little pile labelled MOSAIC.something.   This boils down to a beauty contest
and not much more.

Now, fold in two more possibilites:  First, mosaic often adds its own little
file extensions.  Examples are .old, .backup and .html.  For VMS, if you
didn't already have a "." in the name, you're ok.  So, we really did
need to remove those leading dots.  Unfortunately, these extensions are
additive in some cases, such as something.HTML.BACKUP.  Oops.   That leads us
into the second problem area:  the file names are resources and can be ANYTHING
the user wanted.  Nice feature, but it raises trouble with the extensions.
There is also trouble when Mosaic really wants to prefix the value of HOME
to the string, but the string may already have some use logical name in it.
The fun just doesn't end...

Now, what I would like to do is to clean this up some more as time permits.
I've been resisting, because 1) I didn't want to think about it and 2) changing
names always causes heartburn with someone.  With the approach of the final
2.7, it seems like a good time to consider this.  I don't think that any
of the cases is any less work than any other.  I have no real preference, which
may partially explain why I've been ignoring this for so long.

Finally, if you've read this far, what's your preference ?  (Note that the
use of ".extension" will still have to be changed to "-extension" as mentioned
above):

	- Just remove the leading "."
	- make as many names as possible conform to "mosaic.something" ?
	- leave the current, inconsistent naming as it is ?
	- something altogether different ?

I don't know if I'll have the time to do anything with this, but I'd like to hear
any feedback on the chance that I do.

Thanks,
b


Article 31303 of dec.notes.networking.internet_tools:
Title: NCSA Mosaic V2.7 beta 4
Reply Title: (none)

.14> Mosaic*BackupDataFiles:                 True

Sigh.  This was a can of worms, although easy to find and "fix".  There
are three problems here.  In random order:

1) Here's yet another case of SURPRISE ! due to too many !(@&* knobs.  I
   can offer my apologies for not finding this one before putting the images
   up, but there's simply no way that I'm going to find all of these.

2) NCSA got a bit better about their code, and is using more and more
   "system independent" programming.  What that means in this case is that they
   put together a "my_sterrror" function to handle error number to error string
   conversion for all systems.  Not bad, not bad.  However, when they plugged
   it all back into the code, they didn't always account for the fact that
   in some cases they return NULL.  That's the actual, immediate cause of
   this crash.  I've fixed this particular problem.

3) The start of this thread was file naming.  Mosaic uses a few files, and
   many of these are hidden on UNIX systems by having a name that starts
   with a ".".  For VMS, I removed most of these initial dots for a few
   reasons.  First, null file names are a bit of a pain, and secondly, a
   seperate extension is often added to the name.  That would lead to 2 "."s
   in a name and trouble.  Unfortunately, that's what happened here.  2 dots
   led to a bad name, and a failure in fopen.  That tried to obtain the error
   string for printing, which returned a NULL, which ...

The wordy response to your crash is above.  I'm now going to delve a little more
into the file naming, which has always been something of an irritation and
on which I've never spent much time.

Some of the original file names are (with the VMS version on the right):

.mosaic-global-history			mosaic.global-history
.mosaic-x-history			mosaic.x-history
.mosaic-hotlist-default			mosaic-hotlist-default
.mosaic-personal-annotations		mosaic-personal-annotations
/usr/local/lib/mosaic/documents.menu	documents.menu
.mime.types				mime.types
.mailcap				mailcap.
/usr/local/lib/mosaic/no_proxy		mosaic-proxy.
/usr/local/lib/mosaic/proxy		mosaic-no_proxy.
.mosaiccciport				mosaiccciport.
.mosaic-user-defs			mosaic.user-defs
.mosaicpid				mosaic.pid
.mosaic-spoof-agents			mosaic.spoof-agents
.mosaic-newsrc-%s			mosaic-newsrc-%s

You'll notice that there are two "styles".  Replace the leading "." with
nothing (or a trailing "."), and turn .mosaic-foo-bar into mosaic.foo-bar.
There is little consistency in the names.

Simply removing the leading dash works (exceptions in a minute) most of the
time.  If you're lazy and want all mosaic files, you'll need to look for
mosaic*.*.   The second form of replacement places all files into a nice
little pile labelled MOSAIC.something.   This boils down to a beauty contest
and not much more.

Now, fold in two more possibilites:  First, mosaic often adds its own little
file extensions.  Examples are .old, .backup and .html.  For VMS, if you
didn't already have a "." in the name, you're ok.  So, we really did
need to remove those leading dots.  Unfortunately, these extensions are
additive in some cases, such as something.HTML.BACKUP.  Oops.   That leads us
into the second problem area:  the file names are resources and can be ANYTHING
the user wanted.  Nice feature, but it raises trouble with the extensions.
There is also trouble when Mosaic really wants to prefix the value of HOME
to the string, but the string may already have some use logical name in it.
The fun just doesn't end...

Now, what I would like to do is to clean this up some more as time permits.
I've been resisting, because 1) I didn't want to think about it and 2) changing
names always causes heartburn with someone.  With the approach of the final
2.7, it seems like a good time to consider this.  I don't think that any
of the cases is any less work than any other.  I have no real preference, which
may partially explain why I've been ignoring this for so long.

Finally, if you've read this far, what's your preference ?  (Note that the
use of ".extension" will still have to be changed to "-extension" as mentioned
above):

	- Just remove the leading "."
	- make as many names as possible conform to "mosaic.something" ?
	- leave the current, inconsistent naming as it is ?
	- something altogether different ?

I don't know if I'll have the time to do anything with this, but I'd like to hear
any feedback on the chance that I do.

Thanks,
b