Chris Morgan wrote:
Although not an Inkscape developer, I'm not entirely in favour of "merging instances" of Inkscape.
- I've heard of people running the last stable build and a dev build
concurrently when they run into an issue to try to pinpoint it.
Don't worry, I do that all the time as well, this ability will not go away if I can help it.
- The functionality of Inkscape Portable would be reduced slightly as
it would no longer be able to run if inkscape.exe is already running. 3. Version compatibility in particular - it would need to be implemented carefully so that it doesn't break anything with running different versions, at least back to 0.48.
Again this depends on how exactly this functionality would be implemented. Specifically, in the case of Inkscape I would be inclined to go with a model where it only avoids launching duplicates of the exact same executable.
- Stability: if Inkscape crashes, all windows from that process die.
At times I have intentionally run multiple instances of the same version of Inkscape, because I'm doing something which I know to be a sensitive crash-causing issue and I don't really want to pull down my other document at the same time. (Don't worry, I've reported the bug each time :P)
This is indeed a fair point, and I would prefer an even better model, perhaps a bit like what Chrome uses (and I'm also not totally sold on the "avoid multiple instances" idea, I just feel that it might warrant some looking into). But given that that probably isn't going to happen in the near future it may still be interesting to see what benefits can be gained from avoiding multiple instances.
If Inkscape does crash it's obviously annoying that you loose some time (note that we do have an emergency save, which should now work again, not as convenient as not crashing, but still), but hopefully it won't crash that often that it would outweigh any speed increase in opening files.
... I'm not sure if this is how you'd go about implementing it, so that's why I've spoken up. Does it sound reasonable?
I agree that if we do have a check like this in Inkscape that it should probably be based on the specific executable. As for a preference setting, I'd rather not add it and see how it goes. If it turns out to such a big gain that it's okay if on occasion people have to reopen (not loose work!) a few more files because of a crash then that's fine. If it isn't, then I think we'd better not bother anyway.
With regards to the OS needing to handle this: Yes, I can definitely see Bulia's point, in an ideal world the OS would take care of this kind of thing. But we don't live in that world (unfortunately). So if (and I emphasize IF) we can greatly enhance our user experience by taking care of this ourself (in a relatively easy and lightweight manner) then I would like to do so.