[Sugar-devel] Automatic saving (was: Re: [DESIGN] Etoys 4.1)

[Sascha Silbe]

Excerpts from forster's message of Wed Sep 01 01:07:27 +0200 2010:

> Create a program in Pippy, then look at one of the examples. All your work will be overwritten.
That's a Critical bug, please file a ticket at https://bugs.sugarlabs.org
(with severity set to Critical).

> I have viewed a favourite holiday photo in Browse, then used that Browse session to surf the net, overwriting that photo (can't replicate that now OS373pyg).
If you ever can reproduce it, please file a ticket for this one too
(severity Critical again).

> I would be happy to have a global setting in control panel for all Activities for autosave vs a dialogue which gave a choice on exit. Would that break existing Activities?
It would break the entire design of Sugar.

> Though there is a case for autosave for raw beginners,
Automatic saving isn't for beginners, it's important for everyone.

> its contrary to Sugar's goal of empowering users to give them no control of when saving occurs.
While "no ceiling" ultimately includes giving the user the power to shoot
themselves in the foot, it's not a goal to let that happen as part of the
everyday process.

You got a point, of course. There are currently two things missing from
(mainline) Sugar that affect this use case:
1. version support
2. A "revert all my changes since I opened this activity" button
   (_independent_ of the Stop button)

I've worked [1] on #1, but nobody cared to try it out [2].
#2 is "just" a shortcut; the user can always remove the latest version by
using the Journal.

I'm aware that the current implementation of version support is not
suitable for Sugar running on XO-1 (and _maybe_ XO-1.5) because it
increases the storage overhead and has no easy way to "clean up"
old versions, but on regular PCs which nowadays have hard disks in the
TB (terabytes) range (about 1000 times that of the XO-1) I don't accept
that argument.

I will continue working on version support, but as I'm a single person
and have other things to work on (including finishing my studies and
trying to come up with ways to pay the rent) it will take a lot of time.

Sascha

[1] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Version_support_for_datastore
[2] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Version_support_for_datastore/Howto
--
http://sascha.silbe.org/
http://www.infra-silbe.de/
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