KConfig::checkUpdate()

[Ingo Klöcker]

On Saturday 20 October 2007, Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> On Saturday 20 October 2007, Oswald Buddenhagen wrote:
> > hoi,
> >
> > i sent this mail four years ago to waldo, but it stayed without
> > echo. now i stumbled over the matter again, so here we go:
> >
> > no legacy code in apps). any application run outside kde that does
> > not use this function explicitly is going to miss its updates ...
>
> well, most apps simply don't need to care about it. iirc in the case
> of kmail, it's a potential data loss issue so it really matters. but
> for most apps if the user does something silly or an update doesn't
> run the worse that happens is that the configuration defaults are
> used and the user has to reconfigure by hand.

I'm sorry, but you are wrong. It can happen that Konqueror (or more 
precisely kio_khttp) keeps sending out a user agent string one has 
configured ages ago and that doesn't appear anywhere in the 
configuration dialog of an up-to-date Konqueror. This happened to me 
and I only found this problem because some web page didn't work with 
Konqueror and the web admin replied to my complaint by telling me that 
they do actually test their web site with Konqueror, but that I'm 
sending out a "Netscape 4.78" user agent string. I went to check the 
configuration of Konqueror. It claimed that Konqueror would use his 
standard user agent string. A short test with wireshark proofed that 
Konqueror was lying. Only by grepping $KDEHOME/share/config I found the 
problem in kio_httprc.

So much for "the worse that happens is that the configuration defaults 
are used". Most of our users would not have been able to solve the 
above problem. Yes, most of our users also probably would not have 
changed the user agent string in the first place. But then again 
changing the user agent string used to be a very popular work-around 
for getting some websites to accept Konqueror.

Anyway, what I'm trying to say is that bad things can happen and did 
happen.


Regards,
Ingo
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 194 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part.
URL: <http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-core-devel/attachments/20071022/0d0a7930/attachment.sig>