Re: bug in NSUserDefaults

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On Saturday, February 9, 2002, at 11:19 PM, Erik Dalen wrote:

> hi
>
> I've spent the last few hours trying to install GNUstep with
> GNUSTEP_USER_ROOT=~ instead of =~/GNUstep
> and I've noticed that there's a quite serious but in NSUserDefaults, the
> GNUSTEP_USER_ROOT is hardcoded in it.

I don't think that's a bug ... the GNUSTEP_USER_ROOT environment 
variable is
intended to define one of the places where you can fine application, 
libraries
and other resources.  That doesn't mean that *all* resources will or 
should
be stored there.

The thing about defaults is they need to be both private and writable, so
you really can't work with other peoples defaults, and if your program is
running setuid so that the user it's running as is not the same as the
one it was started as, it needs to change where it gets/puts defaults
info.  This means it has to compute the location of the defaults - it
might well use different defaults databases during oen program run, and
using any environment variable would be bound to be wrong for all but one
of them.