RBrowser 0.972 Beta Release Notes March 1995 This PUBLIC BETA version is released for demonstration purposes only. Some features may not work as documented, others may not work at all. Please destroy *all* copies of RBrowser 0.93 - 0.96 when revised versions are made available; we have chosen not to "time bomb," copy protect, or cripple this version in any way. Your cooperation will ensure this policy continues in the future! >>> Please e-mail bug reports to rbrowser@ddrummer.com <<< I. Changes since 0.95 II. HPPA - SPARC Users III. Support for Object Links IV. Known Features, Contraints, Limitations V. Known Bugs VI. Behavior Differences from Workspace Manager VII. "Secret" dwrite options ==================================================================== I. Changes since 0.95 New features: 1. RBrowser is now available for m68k,i386,hppa and sparc architectures. 2. If there are error messages during file move/copy operations that involve multiple files, there is a choice to abort the whole operation. 3. If the user wants to open a file which RBrowser "thinks" is already open there is now a choice to reopen the file from the remote machine. 4. Some extra warning panels have been added. 5. Extra dwrite "NotFilePackages" added to turn off recognition of the designated file name extensions (described later under Secret dwrites). 6. Help pages have been upgraded. 7. RBrowser now works with zsh (bundled in NS 3.3) which is 8bit clean, therefore handles international characters correctly. Bug fixes: 1. The bug, that caused the filenames to sometimes appear incorrectly, has been fixed. ==================================================================== II. 1. HPPA Users This version of RBrowser was compiled 3Fat on an INTEL machine. RBrowser should work on any released version of INTEL, HPPA, or M68K, but fixedit.sh will only work on HPPA versions Blaze2C and Blaze2X (note the discussion on Object Linking). ==================================================================== III. Support for Object Links Opening a document file in a Workspace File Viewer messages an appropriate application to open that file's name. Since RBrowser's File Viewers represent files that aren't visible to the local filesystem, local applications can't open remote files directly. When you open a document in RBrowser, it's first copied to the local filesystem, and it is the copy that is actually opened. But, when you save changes, only the local copy gets updated. Somehow, RBrowser needs to learn when that happens, so it can keep the original file synchronized. In NEXTSTEP, that somehow is called Object Links. RBrowser acts as a destination for Object Links, and can work with any application that serves as a link source. Unfortunately, many application programmers are too lazy or too ignorant to make the trivial code changes necessary to support this, and sadly, RBrowser has to assume that most applications won't cooperate. RBrowser gets its information about which applications support Object Links from two places: + The ObjectLinksSourceApps default in the NeXT defaults data base for each user + The ObjectLinksSourceApps file in RBrowser's .app wrapper The former holds a semicolon-separated list of application names (*not* full paths); the latter should list one application per line--it may be edited by the system administrator to accommodate applications installed in /LocalApps. RBrowser computes the union of the two lists, unless the first item in the ObjectLinksSourceApps default is a single -, which causes the ObjectLinksSourceApps file to be ignored. | When you attempt to open a document in an application that | isn't known to support Object Links, you will be offered an | opportunity to add it to the list before opening. This will | augment the ObjectLinksSourceApps default, so it persists | across sessions. The only way applications can be removed | from the list (without going behind RBrowser's back, of course) | is if RBrowser later decides that you lied about Object Links | support. Honesty is still the best policy! NeXT's Edit application bundled with NEXTSTEP 3.1 and 3.2 does not work properly "out of the box" even though it was supposedly written with Object Links in mind. Accompanying RBrowser is a shell script called fixedit.sh, which makes a corrected copy of Edit.app. N.B.: this script uses the C compiler. RBrowser itself does not require NEXTSTEP Developer extensions. NEXTSTEP 3.3 Users: There will be no new version if fixedit.sh for NS 3.3. You can simply use the version of Edit you patched for 3.2, it should work just fine (SPARC users: sorry...). You need to run fixedit.sh on an NS 3.2 system and copy the pathched Edit to the MS 3.3 system. Hopefully I can persuade NeXT to fix the bug in Edit for 4.0. ==================================================================== IV. Known Features, Contraints, Limitations 1. File Transfer operations have an 8 hour time limit. 2. Multiple copies of RBrowser running under the same local user name (sharing the same home directory via NFS) may conflict. 3. If two or more usernames on the remote system share the same numeric uid, files might appear to be owned by the "wrong" user. 4. [Inspector] "Apply to files within selection" doesn't always set the "sticky" bit. 5. Connection Preferences always initialized with ISO 8859/1, even when the remote system "obviously" runs NEXTSTEP. 6. The default machine and home directory images can be customized by placing appropriately named images in ~/.AppInfo/RBrowser/Images. RBrowser looks for files called machine:username.tiff or machine.tiff (the former takes precedence) for machine icons. The home directory images are named machine:username.home.tiff or machine.home.tiff. There is currently no way to specify corresponding "open" images. 7. AIX only a. System Administrator must have installed "bosext1" b. Access Control Lists aren't supported c. [Connection Preferences] "Follow Links" links to nonexistent files not handled properly 8. HP/UX only a. Access Control Lists aren't supported b. CDFs aren't supported 9. Large directories can take an excruciatingly long time to load. This will be addressed in a future release. 10. stty commands in .cshrc files can sabotage RBrowser. (They probably belong in .login instead!) 11. Don't start your PATH with "."--this can leave you open to all sorts of nasty surprises. 12. This version of RBrowser was compiled on NEXTSTEP 3.3. It should backward compatible to NS 3.1. 13. Drag-and-drop interface for file transfers only works for Local->Remote and Remote->Remote. For Remote->Local copying please use the "Remote/File/Copy to Local" menu item. ==================================================================== V. Known Bugs 1. NXHelp Index may not be 100% correct. 2. Copy To Local... Save Panel doesn't allow path to be entered from keyboard. 3. [New Connection] Can't log in as root on NEXTSTEP systems. 4. Directories containing compressed man pages on HP/UX systems appear as documents (you need to use the Open as Directory command to view them properly). 5: The available diskspace shown may not be correct if the current path shown in the browser contains a symbolic link. This is due to limitations of the bourne shell. VI. Behavior Differences from Workspace Manager (not a complete list) 1. [File Viewer] File renames only occur when Return is pressed; clicking away reverts to old name. 2. [Inspector] "Compute Size" Button remains enabled after size determination. 3. [Inspector] "Changed" time not displayed for multiple selection. ==================================================================== VII. "Secret" dwrite options 1. UseHomeForOpenFiles Defaults to NO. Temporary documents are stored under ~/.AppInfo/RBrowser/Files unless it is NFS-mounted and /tmp is not, in which case /tmp//RBrowser/Files is used instead. If the UseHomeForOpenFiles default is set to YES, this optimization is disabled. 2. FastFileMoveStartup Defaults to YES. If NO, background file copies can't steal open network connections from File Viewers. 3. NotFilePackages Defaults to "Z;com". When directories encountered with these extensions, they will not be treated as file packages even if are known as application documents on the local system. ".Z" is used as manpage directory on HP-UX and ".com" is used by SoftPC. ==================================================================== Bug reports, suggestions or any other relevant correspondence should be e-mailed to: rbrowser@ddrummer.com RBrowser(tm) is a product of Different Drummer Software Publishing Inc. Mar-8-1995