I discovered something very interesting when I was hunting for the
elusive snark on my HDD ...
I have my Norton Commander set to display files by date/time, newest
first. When I went looking for the inbox index that shouldn't exist, I
found some files at the top of the listing that should NOT have been
there:
lock This was written when I started Arachne at 12:17 today. WHY?
arachne.cfg This was rewritten at 12:33 today, although I'd made no
changes to it and had done nothing with Arachne except go
to the Inbox on boot-up and hit "R" to reload a correct
version of the inbox index, and written one message which
asked the question about that incorrect index.
cookies.lst This was rewritten today at 12:30, although all I'd done
was start Arachne.
It was RErewritten again at 13:05 when I quit [ALT-X]
Every time a file is rewritten for no purpose whatsoever, it slows down
processing time and also makes errors more likely to occur.
Why the cookie list should be written on EXIT is beyond my
understanding, unless someone somehow linked rewriting cookie.lst to
whenever history.lst is rewritten -- and that makes no sense whatsoever.
Another problem I continue to have with cookie.lst in version 1.70r3 is
that it is being truncated after 64 lines. I *know* a cookie file can
grow like crazy; some sites I've visited probably put more than 64
cookies in for just that site alone -- which could explain why I've had
trouble maintaining ASP sessions or getting things to work correctly on
some sites.
Cookie list management should be in the hands of the USER and *not* done
arbitrarily by the software. If variable can be set into arachne.cfg
that allows the user to determine the number of lines at which the
cookie file gets truncated, that might be OK. But it should be a user
decision. I don't like not being able to use sites because cookies have
gone away while I am using the site. I have a 'permanent cookie list'
that I can copy over, and start from scratch ... so I could stand being
able to set Arachne to start truncating at 100 lines or whatever.
l.d.
-- Arachne V1.70;rev.3, NON-COMMERCIAL copy, http://arachne.cz/
