| Friday, March 21, 2008 |
08:16 - Venus Usertrap
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I just discovered an unpleasant and, apparently, long-standing bug in OS X. It allows you to rename your Home folder, right in the Finder.
It happens in the Sidebar. You open it up, right-click on the home folder name (which is the same as your "short name", the Unixy sanitized alphanumeric-string version of your real name), and among other options, it gives you a "Rename" option. Which works.
After which, naturally, your applications that depend on finding files at a specific path in your home folder, can't—and they break.
Now, allegedly they fixed this in 10.5.1. Or so I am told. But a co-worker of mine just fell into the following trap: She noticed that her home folder (in her sidebar) had the name of someone else, someone who had originally set up the computer and passed it over to her. She'd already changed her full name in the Accounts Preferences, but while Tiger (which she's using) prevents you from arbitrarily changing your "short name" (like any good Unix should), the Finder giddily gives you not only the options shown above, but also a bunch of other Finderesque options, like Automator actions, Folder Actions, and everything else you get if you right-click on a file somewhere in a Finder window. So, reasonably, she changed the folder's name, and then was surprised to find that Mail had frozen. When she restarted it, it started prompting her to go through the initial setup wizard again.
I quickly discovered the problem (it's way easier when they volunteer helpful tidbits like "I just renamed my account; you think that might have had anything to do with it?"), but was also floored by the presence of what appeared to be a huge bug in OS X: you simply shouldn't be allowed to do things like that. And indeed, in my poking around, I heard that this bug is indeed well known, and that 10.5.1 was supposed to have fixed it.
And it did... sort of.
It fixed it only in Column View.
I experimented a little and found that if you right-click on your Home folder in the sidebar while your Finder window is in Column View, the "Rename" option isn't there. But in Icon, List, or Cover Flow view, it's still available, and still (presumably) works.
Know what I think happened? I think Apple is still in the grip of NeXT-heads. People making the decisions on these sorts of things are so NeXT-oriented in their thinking that Column View is the only view they ever use. Indeed, many OS X converts or long-time users are probably like that, never having used NeXT but spending all their time in Column View; I know I'm one of them. And if I'd never thought to try other views (like the ones my co-worker uses), I'd never have noticed that this bug still remains active and ready to ensnare a great many people, who quite understandably might want to change the name on a folder they see in every single Finder window that always reminds them of the person who originally set up the computer and not themselves. There's no reason for them to expect that a simple renaming of a folder might ruin their whole computing environment, but it's bound to happen sooner or later.
In a side note, this knowledge-base article attempts to describe the proper way to change your Home folder's name—short answer, "create a new account, move everything over, chown it to the new user, and delete the old one", just like in any Unix—but check out the wacky informal language:
Mac OS X does not allow you to easily change a user's short name, and earlier versions do not allow you to change your Home folder name. Though you can change your Home name in v10.3 or later, you usually shouldn't. If you really need to change these names (which should match), use the procedure described below.
The article is also way out of date (10.3.9). Plus it seems to kindasorta suggest that this is the intended behavior (though evidently they changed their mind later, or something). Still, it's much better that a user finds himself reading it than a Finder menu that happily lets you just rename the folder. For now I guess we just have to hope lots of people use Column View...
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Brian Tiemann
