03.21.07
Troubleshoot Camino 1.1
Troubleshoot Camino 1.1 is out.
Troubleshoot Camino is a small AppleScript droplet I wrote, inspired by Stuart, to facilitate testing Camino under a fresh profile in troubleshooting situations. You can drop your copy of Camino 1.1a1 or higher on Troubleshoot Camino and Camino will run using all of its default settings, helping to find (or rule out) problems caused by changes you have made to Camino’s preferences or cookies. When you’re done checking for the bug or issue you were experiencing, quit Camino, and the next time you launch Camino, all of your old settings, cookies, bookmarks, and history will be restored. (In fact, your settings never moved; Camino just didn’t look at them. In the past, we had problems where some people would accidentally break or discard their profiles while trying to create a fresh profile. Thanks to Håkan’s work on CAMINO_PROFILE_DIR, we can now avoid this problem and automate the fresh profile-creation process.)
Unfortunately, in recent months a number of Camino add-ons have appeared that live outside the profile directory and are not disabled by a fresh profile. Sometimes these add-ons have caused problems, and they were hard for users to detect. The sole purpose of Troubleshoot Camino 1.1 is to provide a mechanism that, with the help of add-on authors, will ease troubleshooting by enabling a true “fresh profile” even when these add-ons are installed on a user’s Mac.
Technical mumbo-jumbo
Troubleshoot Camino now exports a CAMINO_DISABLE_HACKS environment variable. If you’re an add-on author, please have your add-on check for the presence of this environment variable when loading and have the add-on disable itself if the variable is set. Stuart has helpfully provided some sample code to check for this variable.
We on the Camino team recognize that Camino users will want features that we will never add to Camino (or we cannot, for one reason or another, add right now) and that third-party add-ons will appear to satisfy these users’ desires. By working together, we can ensure that a user’s experience is as painless as possible when problems do appear and that it will be easy to isolate the source of problems. If you are an author of a Camino add-on, we appreciate your cooperation in adding support to check for CAMINO_DISABLE_HACKS in your code.
Edit 2007-03-28: Don’t stomp Unsanity’s trademark in the variable name—although if there are any APE modules written specifically for Camino, I hope they will check for the environment variable, too.