KDE refuses to start, part 2

[jkinz at kinz.org (Jeff Kinz)]

resend - (hey - where's the reply-to header? :-) )
On Thu, Feb 20, 2003 at 09:32:06AM -0500, Ken Gosier wrote:
> after renaming to .bashrc.old, voila, kde starts again! So after
> investigating the .bashrc file, it turns out the offending line was
> (drumroll please...)
> 
> set -o noclobber
> 
> I'm a little worried that this now confirms my status as a Redhat luser.
> :-/ But seriously, this seems strange to me that a simple thing like this
> will cause kde so many problems. Am I just complaining, or should kde be
> able to deal more gracefully with something like this?

No.  KDE is expecting a normal UNIX-style environment.  One of the most basic
tenets of the UNIX philosophy is "Let the user/program do anything it wants".
It is the responsibility of the user/program not to do anything harmful.

An environment with the noclobber option on is a totally different one from
the normal UNIX-style environment.  It is more, shall we say "VMS like"?

My experiences with noclobber found that having noclobber on breaks a large 
number of tools/programs/scripts etc....

A possible fix would be to find every place in the KDE code which might
overwrite an existing file and do an rm -f (or its programmatic equivalent)
on the file prior to writing but I think this is the wrong approach.

Did you set noclobber because you are worried about using rm with wildcards?


-- 
Jeff Kinz, Emergent Research,  Hudson, MA.  "jkinz at rcn.com" 
"jkinz at ultranet.com" copyright 2003.  Use is restricted. Any use is an 
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