On Sat, Jun 10, 2006 at 02:14:10PM +0200, Colin Marquardt wrote:

Hi,

on IRC, we had two occurrences on the last two days where people had crashes with emergency save activated, but didn't have a saved file around.

One of them was Thomas Vander Stichele (from Fluendo), and he is running 0.43 from Fedora Core 4, and the file has not been saved before.

Is there something we can do to make that emergency save as bulletproof as possible? This is one of the worst bugs to have IMO. Of course, crashes should not happen in the first place, but if they happen...

I don't know what the correct solution is, but agree that this would be a highly useful thing to work on for 0.45. I imagine it'd probably take at least a couple people looking at it from different angles to make it sufficiently bulletproof. It's going to take analyzing how crashes are occurring and not getting handled by the signal trapper - perhaps there are other signals not getting trapped?

It would be interesting to test against situations like out of disk space, out of memory, heavy cpu load, etc. and see if document loss can be prevented during crashes in those cases as well.

Of course, the ultimate danger is a power failure or kernel panic; in such cases inkscape will never get a chance to do an emergency save. What to be done in this situation probably could use some discussion. I would think some people would feel this is not an error situation that Inkscape is responsible for handling; others may say it means Inkscape must be able to do interim automatic backups. In any case, this is a problem many others have solved before us, so perhaps a good first step would be for someone to survey the best solutions that already exist in graphical or open source apps, and identify some good options for us to consider.

Bryce