Desperate plea: MenuMaestro

[Jay R. Ashworth]

On Wed, Jun 09, 2004 at 11:42:05AM -0400, Joe Chasan wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 09, 2004 at 10:51:58AM -0400, Jay R. Ashworth wrote:
> > Anyone got a manual they can a) email me, b) photocopy for me, c) sell me?
> > 
> > And, on a more pressing note: anyone know what the :phantom: command
> > does?
> > 
> > I can't get gmm to handle phantom permissions correctly, and MenuEze
> > pukes on the files cause they have phantom commands in them that I
> > don't know what they do.
> 
> i have two menumaster manuals, one menueze, and one menumaestro.
> the :phantom: command seems to be in menumaestro manual only.

So I was gathering.

> if you send me your fax # i will send you the 'phantom' command pages (2).

Sure.   You can fax it to 727-573-2342; attention me.

> as i still have menu_whatever installations, i'm not willing to part with
> it on a permanent basis, but if you're really stuck you can give me your 
> fedex acct #, i can lend you for say 2 weeks, you can copy/scan/whatever
> the near 200 pages, then send back.

I suspect it's not that big a deal.

> the phantom command, however, is somewhat limited in its usefulness and
> i don't remember using it too often.

My question is merely, what do I have to go through to rip it out so
MenuEze will run my tree.

> basically, what happened is this - menumaster (and its children) had always
> had bugs when 2+ people selected same menu option at same time if those
> option used the 'selector' or 'replace' commands - commonly, you'd see
> the file get overwritten with a zero length file, forcing you to scramble
> for some backup version.
> 
> at some point, not sure which version, in order to fix this they decided to 
> not write to the original file anymore but to a uniquely named copy of it,
> and the subsequent report/screen line would internally "know" to use this
> file - the name was hidden and it was just nicknamed the "phantom" file
> in the docs - the report or screen line never had to know the actual name
> of the phantom file (sel.aging copy might be sel.01242aab)

And every version of Menu* I've ever used did it that way.  Most of
them seem to forget to erase the damn things, but at least they work.

> the :phantom: command gives you access to this filename.

Hmmm.

> i think you needed the $gmmmulti system variable to be set to "on" for
> this to work, and the phantom command returns the last part of the filename.

Hmmm, more.

> as was intimated earlier, all relates to $tmpdir (i think defaulted to /tmp
> on sco), where each users list of open "phantom" files were stored under
> sels$upid - and i think $upid is not necessarily PID, but something assigned
> by menumaestro.  of course mm needed full perms on a lot of places, perhaps
> thats still your issue on either $tmpdir or the filepro file itself
> (something that gets "fixed" with fp's setperm thing)
> 
> syntax
> :phantom:filepath:[env_var]:[erase]

Curiouser.

I'm starting to suspect that the problem is that SuSE's chown(2)
doesn't by default permit you to give away files, and MM has to give
the phantom away to filePro to make sure it will be readable.

Cheers,
-- jra
-- 
Jay R. Ashworth                                                jra at baylink.com
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