Radio playlist always untouchable

I've recently installed netjuke using the Debian unstable package
(version 1.0b16-1) and cannot figure out how to convince prefs-edit.php
that the playlist I would like to have netjuke edit is completely world
readable, writable, etc.

Even setting the playlist to /tmp/playlist.txt with chmod 777 does not
work.

Please let me know how I can help debug this.  The relevant piece of
code are lines 57 and 58 of admin/prefs-edit.php:

  if ( (! <at> is_writeable($radio_plist_dir)) || (! <at> touch($radio_plist))) {
    alert( ADMPREF_ERR_RADIOPLIST );

No matter what I try,  <at> touch always fails.

What basic piece of information am I missing here?

Thanks.

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