Subject: bug in pc-pine 4.21: initial directory creation may fail

From: Robin Putzar <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 5 Jul 2000 16:06:52 +0200 (Westeuropäische Sommerzeit)

There seems to be a bug in pc-pine v4.21. During its first startup pc-pine
creates a directory "$HOME\mail". If "$HOME" is not a valid directory (if
it doesn't exist), pc-pine fails and terminates. (It prints a detailed
error-message, though, so one can easily create the directory by hand.)

Robin Putzar

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From: Scott Leibrand <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 5 Jul 2000 14:10:37 -0700 (PDT)

That sounds like reasonable behavior to me.  It doesn't have any problem
if $HOME is undefined (it just uses c:\mail).  So if you've defined $HOME
to be a nonexistent directory, I'd say it's perfectly valid to terminate
instead of creating the directory.  Of course, it might be nice if it
asked you if you wanted to create the directory, but that seems like more
of a feature request than a bug report.  :)

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Scott Leibrand
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From: Robin Putzar <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 7 Jul 2000 17:41:50 +0200 (Westeuropäische Sommerzeit)

Ok, it's no bug.
Well, I was a bit confused the first time I started pc-pine. First thing 
it did was telling me it will create a path \users\default\pine and then
it aborted, telling me that \users\default\pine did not exist. So maybe
the bug is in the dialog text and not the program code.

After all I had no idea how pine came to \users\default\pine, since not
$HOME was set, but $HOMEDRIVE and $HOMEPATH. (They are not mentioned in
the doc, afaik, but they seem to have the same effect.) This is a computer
I use at work, and I'm not the system administrator, so I don't know who
set that directory and why.

I don't have any other programs that use $HOME. So picking up your reply I
suggest the following change to pc-pine: If $HOME does not exist, pc-pine
tells the user that "$HOME is set to a non-existing path
('\user\default')." and asks him whether $HOME should be created or not.
(This seems to me a very reasonable behaviour. I like if software is nice
to me, so why not program it to be polite?)