On Fri, 2006-05-05 at 23:34 +0000, Terry Hancock wrote:
Would it make more sense to do time-based or even idle-time-based autosaves (I.e. if nothing happens for N minutes, and the current data is not saved, make an automatic backup)? I know some programs have implemented features like this. It can be irritating if it decides to do a backup right when you're starting to do something, but it would be really nice if something calls you away from your project, and you forget to save it.
The big problem is really how to make the autosave parallelizable so it can work in the background. It's not just a matter of doing it in another thread -- with the current data structures, you'd still have to lock all the data structures while saving, still bringing the main thread to a halt.
If autosave could be made to work seamlessly in the background, then I wouldn't really object to it. I really like the way Rosegarden does autosaves.
-mental