Re: [O] New feature? Remove duplicate subheadings, preserving order

[Nick Dokos]

Allen Li <address@hidden> writes:

>
> I don’t see a use case for checking all heading data.
>
>>> Since the point would be remove duplicates from lists, I don’t think
>>> warning is very useful.  I would want to remove the duplicate list
>>> items, not get a warning about it and delete them manually.  Perhaps
>>> that would be a useful additional feature however (like uniq -d).
>>
>> I think warning or asking for confirmation should be the default action,
>> because it's the safest option.  Users who want to skip that could use a
>> prefix argument or call it from a custom command.
>
> There is always undo and automatic Emacs file backups.
>

There be dragons.

The problem is that some things happen invisibly and far away from
where you are, so you don't know about it and you don't find out for a
couple of weeks.  Undo and automatic backups are useless in that case.

That *has* happened: there have been multiple postings in the ML about
such problems. Whenever it has happened, the devs have always modified
org to make it safer: that is the prudent thing to do and the correct
course of action IMO.

Hell hath no fury like an orgmode user who lost part of his/her
precious org file because of an errant keystroke a month ago and was
not aware of the loss until it was too late.

-- 
Nick