Timed saves for backup

[Ted Gould]

[19:55:17] <Ted> Pissed me off because I forgot to
save. We need to get timed backups working for dumb
asses like me.
[19:55:32] <mental> we do have autosave
[19:55:39] <Ted> We do?
[19:55:46] <mental> unless the crash was a result of a
SIGABRT rather than a SEGV or something
[19:55:49] <mental> I need to fix that sometime
[19:56:10] <mental> unfortunately crashes due to
assertion failures currently do not trigger the
autosave mechanism
[19:56:12] <bryce> well, scribus has a nifty text box
thingee and some page/document management stuff
[19:56:32] <mental> presumably because if we weren't
careful it'd easily result in SIGABRT recursion
[19:56:51] <mental> but if someone wants to go and fix
that...
[19:56:59] <Ted> mental, Okay, but, I guess I was
thinking something like saving ever fixed interval. I
mean, if we get that far we may not be able to save a
'good' version of the document.
[19:57:36] <mental> true, though unless something's
been scribbling all over everything, 90% of the time
the repr stuff should be fine
[19:57:46] <mental> but, yes
[19:57:53] <mental> if you or someone want to implement
autosave, feel free
[19:57:54] <bryce> mental, yeah that's actually one of
the few tasks I left on the roadmap for this release.
I think we need to get that fixed.
[19:57:57] <mental> timed autosave, I mean
[19:59:59] <Ted> GTK+ has timers right?
[20:00:15] <Ted> Ones that just attach to the main run
loop.
[20:00:26] <Ted> (I really don't want to do POSIX timers)
[20:12:35] * mental returns
[20:12:37] <mental> yes, GTK does
[20:12:42] <mental> actually, it might be a Glib
feature nowadays
[20:13:58] <mental> yeah, see g_timeout_add or
g_timeout_add_full
[20:14:12] <mental>
http://developer.gnome.org/doc/API/2.0/glib/glib-The-Main-Event-Loop.html#g
-idle-add
[20:15:15] <Ted> Okay, thought: should timed save be
document based (like each document has an x minute
timer) or one timer for the whole program?
[20:15:34] <Ted> I see the downside I see to having a
whole program timer is that it may 'stop' if you have
lots of documents open.
[20:15:59] <Ted> But it seems like a waste to have so
many timers.
[20:16:00] <mental> ah, all the documents saving at
once, you mean?
[20:16:11] <mental> well, I think it should forego
saving the documents if they have not changed
[20:16:16] <mental> (as determined by the modified marker)
[20:16:44] <bryce> you're saving to a backup file
rather than the original, right?
[20:16:46] <JonCruz> Java preferences is one place I've
seen that general problem addressed before
[20:16:49] <Ted> Yeah, that makes sense. But I'm just
worried about someone working on something like an icon
set, where they could have tons of small documents that
all are saved at once.
[20:17:08] <Ted> bryce, yeah.
[20:17:50] <Ted> I'm thinking
~/.inkscape/backup/filename.time
[20:19:38] <mental> Ted: well, even if you stagger them
somehow there's still a breakdown point where you have
so many modified documents that it won't finish before
the next save cycle
[20:19:46] <mental> or it'd just take an obscenely long
time to save
[20:19:50] <mental> so it's not an easy answer
[20:20:23] <Ted> Yeah, probably should detect that
case... I didn't think of the infinte save issue.
[20:28:29] <JonCruz> Ted: just do what emacs does as
far as the autosaving
[20:29:29] <Ted> JonCruz, which is?
[20:33:02] <JonCruz> IIRC, for autosave files, it puts
a '#' on the begining and end
[20:33:46] <JonCruz> Then also prepends '.#' as a
symlink to the instance of emacs that's doing the editing
[20:35:39] <Ted> I thought that '~' at the end was more
common?
[20:35:46] <Ted> What do you mean by 'a symlink to the
instance of emacs'? To the executable?
[20:36:15] <Ted> How often does it save? What if you
have multiple docs open? All at the same time?
[20:36:15] <Ted> (does it save them all at the same time)
[20:36:38] <JonCruz> the '~' at the end is the
*pre-edit* version
[20:37:20] <Ted> Oh, I didn't know that! That is
really good to know.
[20:37:30] <Ted> Do we thing that we should be doing
that too?
[20:37:35] <JonCruz> ls -lrt ~/\.*metadata.txt*
lrwxrwxrwx 1 joncruz joncruz 45 Feb 22 20:29
/home/joncruz/.#metadata.txt ->
<email address hidden>:1068699534

[20:37:55] <JonCruz> 8920 was the pid of the emacs
instance I was running

[Jon A. Cruz (jon-joncruz)]

Closed RFE 1052781 "Autosave" as it is a dup of this one.