Dear Mr. McWilliams,
your article at
http://www.internetnews.com/wd-news/article/0,,10_445381,00.html
sounds really very excitingly - but you somehow forgot to meniton,
that Arachne is not deleting specificaly C:\DOS directory - Arachne is
deleting %TEMP% directory, and only if caching to TEMP directory is
enabled, which hasn't beed default setting until 1.66
I think it was rather Microsoft's oversight, that in DOS 5.0, TEMP was set
to C:\DOS, which many people consider to be rather stupid
decision. I had no knowledge about this "feature" of DOS 5.0, because I
never used out-of-the-box DOS 5.0, in fact. I have DOS 5.0 on my HP-LX,
but there is no such default TEMP directory setting present.
I think it would be fair to publish this response somehow, at least as
"under the line" comment to mentioned article, or something like that.
Article mentions uppercase "C:\DOS" 3 times - but there is only one small
lowercase note about "if PC is configured to dump temporary files there" -
without mentioning, that marking system files as temporary files is VERY
stupid option, and all long-time Arachne users were scared to find out
that such setting is actually possible...
BTW, if your TEMP is set to C:\ or D:\DOS or even C:\WINDOWS, the problem
will be of course same. I think it is really unfair to publish that some
program is deleting C:\DOS directory. Windows OS is BTW formatting ext2fs
partions on your disk, if you want to use *this* point of view...
Arachne will check for presence of COMMAND.COM or presence of string DOS
or WINDOWS in %TEMP% string in next release, and temporary directory
path will additionaly displayed in setup wizard screens. But I
consider Unix's /tmp directory, which is always present in filesystem, to
be much better idea.
Thank you for your attention,
Michael Polak
--
http://arachne.cz/
(Arachne WWW browser for DOS+Linux / Webhosting / MP3streaming)
