Summary: non-well-formed preferences.xml causes data loss Bug ID: 866103 ------------------------------------------------------------------------

1. edit ~/.inkscape/preferences.xml so it's not well-formed (e.g. delete any > in a tag)

2. run inkscape

3. quit

The file is overwritten with all the default preferences, all old data in it is lost.

Expected behavior: use default values while the program is running but NOT overwrite data on quit if it was not read successfully, or at least leave a backup copy.

--buliabyak

Currently there's no way to discriminate between a failure to load preferences because the file did not exist yet and a failure because that file was not well-formed.

-- mental

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What's a good approach for dealing with this issue? Do we need to have a validation step so that it's possible to descriminate good from bad files?

This sounds like a fairly easy thing to fix once an approach is decided.

Bryce