Subject: RE: Darn
From: WJCarpenter (bill-abisource@carpenter.ORG)
Date: Thu Dec 07 2000 - 16:33:42 CST
al> # what the hell? Abiword seems to love setting my preferences to
al> # defaults every time it runs. this happens even if i set a preference
al> # in the dialog box and press OK, then restart abiword. I have
al> # verified this using both libxml2 and expat.
If my guess is correct, two different factors are conspriring to
confuse you (and, I daresay, other users). Part of this is probably
mis-design, but there is at least one true bug.
1. The preferences file has a "_builtin_" section. That's completely
ignored on read-in, and all the _builtin_ values are actually compiled
into AbiWord. The section is in the file at all merely as a reference
to people who'd like to create a custom section (which you can call
anything you'd like, but AbiWord will write it back out as
"_custom_"). When AbiWord is re-writing the preferences, it blindly
dumps out the _builtin_ stuff from compiled defaults, and then it
writes a value in the _custom_ section for anything that's different
from the _builtin_ setting. If there are no differences, you don't
get a _custom_ section.
2. There is a difference between making a preference setting active
in AbiWord via a dialog box (or whatever means) and persisting it to
the preferences file. In the "Preference Scheme" tab of the
Preferences dialog box, there is an "autosave" check box. If you have
that checked, any time you make a change to a preference value, the
preferences file gets written out. There is also "Save" button on the
bottom of the Preferences dialog box. My experience is that the
"Save" button has not ever worked (at least since I first tried it,
probably in 0.7.10 release binaries).
So, the quick fix for the bug is probably to make "Save" actually do
what you think. I don't know how "quick" that would be, but it
*sounds* quick. I don't think it's a showstopper since it's been
broken a long time.
-- bill@carpenter.ORG (WJCarpenter) PGP 0x91865119 38 95 1B 69 C9 C6 3D 25 73 46 32 04 69 D6 ED F3
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