X11 apps killing own configurations?

[Havoc Pennington]

On Fri, 2004-03-12 at 18:58, Dennis Jacobfeuerborn wrote:
> Hi,
> A minute ago I started X11 was informed that X couldn't be started since 
> my root partition was full. So far so good. But when I freed 500mb and 
> started X again both XMMS and GAIM lost their configuration and started 
> in their default setup. Does anybody know how this can happen?
> 

XMMS and GAIM may not properly save configuration. A common robust
procedure to write a config file is to write to a temporary file,
checking errors on every write and on close(), then rename the temporary
file over the top of the final filename if it's all successful. Only
downside is that this uses 2x disk space temporarily.

If an app instead just truncates the existing file and starts writing it
again, it can fail to write the new one.

Havoc