Man page doesn't explicitly state that system config is always used

[ShadowTek]

Binary package hint: slrn

I'm using Ubuntu 9.04 AMD64 Desktop, with slrn 1.0.0~pre2-1.

The man page makes several references to the default dir for slrnrc as being HOME, but that wasn't where it was looking.

From the man page:
/////
" -i config-file
              Read file as the initialization (slrnrc) file. The default is to use .slrnrc (or slrn.rc on VMS, OS/2 and Windows) in your home directory."

" SLRNHOME
              When interpreting filenames as relative to your home directory, slrn uses this variable to find out what your home directory is. If $SLRNHOME is unset, $HOME is used instead."

" $HOME/.slrnrc
              User-specific configuration file."
/////

When I first started slrn, it said:
...
   Reading startup file /etc/news/slrn.rc.
...

I then started slrn with the "-i" switch to use the file that was actually in $HOME, and the result was:
...
   Reading startup file /etc/news/slrn.rc.
   Reading startup file slrn.rc.
...

So now it's trying to read from 2 files? lol

I thought that maybe the use of the file in the root-owned /etc/ dir would be an intentional security move, but if the default permissions still allow non-root users to read the file, including passwords stored in it, then what good is it for security purposes?

Anyway, I just went ahead and started using the file in /etc/news/, and there's no problems with that.

Edit: I forgot to mention that I tried setting SLRNHOME=$HOME in .bashrc, but that had no effect on where slrn was looking for slrnrc.

[Andrew McCarthy (andrewmccarthy)]

Thanks for taking the time to report this. From my reading of the source, slrn will always read slrn.rc in /etc first. This file is for settings that are appropriate for all users on the computer (such as the correct news server, etc). The slrnrc file in your home directory is read after that, and is where individual users can set personal preferences.

This is simply something that should be better explained in the man page.

[Brian Murray (brian-murray)]

I think this is fairly well explained in the man page:

       $HOME/.slrnrc
              User-specific configuration file.

       config_dir/slrn.rc
              System-wide configuration file. config_dir is set at compile time (/usr/local/etc by default).

Right after .slrnc in the FILES section we have information about the system wide configuration file.

[Andrew McCarthy (andrewmccarthy)]

I think the confusion reported is that the man page doesn't specify that the system-wide rc file is always read, regardless of the presence of the user's .slrnrc or the use of the -i command-line flag.