Tomboy does not check for changed files when saving to file

[markba]

Binary package hint: tomboy

Tomboy does not check for changed files when saving to file. Normally this is not a problem, because Tomboy is in design a single user application. But, when notes are stored a a central location (server) and through a symbolic link in ~/.tomboy, these notes are made accesable to Tomboy, this can lead to dataloss.

Steps to reproduce:
- set up two workstations with the Tomboy applet active
- open a note on workstation 1
- modify this and close it
- open the same note on workstation 2
- modify this and close it
- note that modification of the forst note are lost
- note that only the modification of the second workstation are stored

It would be better if Tomboy would detect that the file to be written has been changed. This detection could be implemented by file timestamp or CRC-check. This mechanism is common practice among text editors, they provide you an option when trying to write to a modified file, asking something like this: "File has been changed (by another user), Reload Yes/No?".

I would like to have implemented something like this in Tomboy, it would greatly enhance multi-user usability. In fact, it is now next to useless (for me) because I'm always at the risk of losing data.

Changes are immediately written to file (save-as-you-type). That's good as it means absolutely no data loss on a crash of GDM or worse.

It looks like notes are loaded, thus cached and not refreshed when GDM is activated. So, it does not matter if the note in question is actually opened or not. This makes my problem much worse: only the activation of Tomboy could mean potential data loss.

When restarting the windows manager, cache is refreshed. This can also be seen as a workaround. But when I forget this, I could lose data.

At first, I thought the combination of Tomboy and centralized notes were the answer for my previous method of note taking: store some text files centrally on a server and change them with any text editor you like. This problem (which may look small in it self) makes me think of returning to my old method which is in any way absolute robust.

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

That's probably not the right way to do notes synchronization, you might want to take a look to Tomboy 0.7 in Gutsy, it includes some very good features for doing syncs. thanks for your report.