On Thu, 18 Nov 1999, Paul Rohr wrote:
> 1. Just crash recovery.
> ------------------------
Might be nice, but I could live without it, particularly if autosave
is available. Power failures are rare enough and I save often enough
that I'd be happy just taking the risk of losing data if the machine
goes down. As for abiword crashing, recent releases have been very
stable for me and I expect this trend to continue. As for the OS,
well, if your OS is unstable, save often or upgrade, I guess.
Just my opinion, of course.
> 2. Autosave in place.
> ----------------------
> I believe that this is what Jeff is thinking about. It allows any file to
> be autosaved in place, but this feature *must* be enabled on a per-file
> basis (not globally and not by default).
This would be very very useful for me!!!
I'd rather not just overwrite the file on disk, but rename it, do the
save, then delete the old one. It would scare me if the *entire* file
could disappear just because I decided to pull the power plug for fun.
Losing an hour's work is a fair price to pay for a dumb mistake, but
losing everything is not; save needs to be robust. (Is it already?)
> 3. Fast-save.
> --------------
> This isn't really either of the first two (although something like it can be
> used as a technique for implementing either of them).
I think you agree that this is not needed. I'm working with some rather
large documents (~500K), and the time it takes to save them is negligible.
You guys have the performance really nailed here, it seems.
> 4. Version save.
> -----------------
> Again, this is yet another class of features. How you implement it depends
> on what granularity of changes are interesting to a wide-enough variety of
> users.
> A more compact alternative would be to just keep track of discrete changes
> from version to version. However, this is likely to require a different
> mechanism to do it properly. Until someone's ready to try to implement
> this, I'll hold off on exploring the design alternatives.
This certainly is an intriguing idea; I had just been checking my
abiword documents into RCS, before I decided that it was too much
bother. (I never look at the older ones, just the latest.) Do
any other word processors implement this sort of feature?
Thanks a lot for listening to my babble!
- Kevin Vajk
<kvajk@ricochet.net>