Serious problem with kconfig et al.

[Knut Johansson]

Hi all 
 
First of I will start to say that I know the the cause of the problem are not 
KDE related, but probably caused by sloppy administration and experimentation  
with unstable drivers etc. But what causes it are not important, but the  
effect on my KDE desktop are. This is not a new problem, I have experienced  
it on different installs since the KDE 2.something days. Since I feel this is  
a serious problem with the configuration infrastructure an touches most  
applications, I think it's better to have the discussion on the mailinglist  
rather than filing it in bugzilla.  
 
With abnormal termination of KDE applications "loose" their configuration and 
reverts to the default setting. With abnormal termination I consider  
situations like forced reboot on lock ups, powerloss and similar. I have been  
using different kinds of journaling FSes, and have never experienced FS  
corruption in these cases. 
 
It looks like some settings are more "easy" to lose compared to others, in my  
case the settings in LookNFeel->style and Peripherals->mouse are different  
than defalt and the most likely to loose their settings. Somewhat less  
frequent are the loss of settings from kicker and the running applets.  
 
The loss of some desktop settings are not a big problem, but this missbehavior  
affects all running applications. The loss of your nettwork settings in KMail 
are more than a little inconvenience, specially when you use several accounts. 
And even worse are the effect when this happens to KWallet. 
 
I'm not quite sure whats happening, but looking at some of the damaged rc  
files they are mostly filled with random binary garbage or pieces of other rc  
files. Actually my kdewallet.kwl file now contains a big part of the  
kdeglobals rc file. 
 
It looks like kconfig and friends does something nasty here. In my opinion 
crashes should not damage the rc files, at least the files where no changes  
has been made.  
 
Regards 
Knut 
 
PS, I'm not subscribed to this list, please CC me.