Re: [lmi] Autosave

[Greg Chicares]

On 2014-10-12 15:26Z, Vadim Zeitlin wrote:
> On Sun, 12 Oct 2014 15:21:33 +0000 Greg Chicares <address@hidden> wrote:
[...]
> GC> To shed at least a little light on it: some office workers leave their
> GC> word processor open for a month, and rarely save documents. When they
> GC> lose weeks of work due to an abrupt termination, they may concede that
> GC> they might have saved more often, but still they feel ill served by
> GC> the software, hardware, network, electric company, etc. And we're not
> GC> going to implement "autosave" in lmi.
> 
>  Out of curiosity, why not? I consider this to be an absolutely required
> feature (at least for any program dealing with user input) and I'd be
> definitely disappointed if a program I used lost any of my data, whether it
> was a result of several weeks or 15 minutes of work.

Autosave is a complicated feature, and less is more.

How many saved versions are kept? If your answer is...

 - one: then it's a disaster if I explicitly save a file I need, then
make a speculative change that turns out to be a bad idea, and then the
program terminates just before I close the changed version--and curse the
harmful autosave feature for overwriting the file I deliberately saved.

 - two (the last one I saved, and the last auto-saved one): then someday
I'll want the next-to-last auto-saved version. And this applies to three,
four, etc. by mathematical induction. Furthermore, which saved version is
the program to pick? If it makes that choice automatically, it may choose
one I don't want. Otherwise, we need a GUI for autosave support, which
will take considerable effort; and what if adding this feature introduces
new defects, worse than we had before?

 - three, four...: see "two" above.

 - infinity: I guess that's the One True Answer, which apple is pursuing:
     http://support.apple.com/kb/ht4753
In this case, File|Save isn't even needed anymore. Eliminating it makes
the interface simpler--except that then we need to add File|Lock, which
necessitates File|Unlock. And then there's...AUTO-LOCK! With a user-
configurable AUTO-LOCK DURATION! Well, if the OS does all the hard work,
then maybe I'll leveraging it.