http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=159634 Tim Holy holy pcg wustl edu changed: What |Removed |Added ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- CC| |holy@pcg.wustl.edu --- Comment #7 from Tim Holy 2008-11-07 12:24:42 --- With Kubuntu Intrepid packages (kmail 1.10.1), the autosave feature often works for me. HOWEVER, there is at least one serious problem with the design of this feature. This can be revealed by doing the following (first, finish and send out any in-progress messages or save them as drafts, because otherwise you will lose all your work): 1. In konsole, navigate to ~/.kde/share/apps/kmail/autosave 2. Type "kontact &" 3. In kontact, start a new message 4. Wait for the autosave interval---you will see output on the command line when autosave executes 5. Examine cur/ for messages; you should see a file corresponding to your in-progress message (at least on Kubuntu, that is; from the above it seems this might not work for some people...) 6. Quit kontact. Wait a moment for it to really quit. Then restart kontact. Your in-progress message should pop up in a composer window, suggesting that all is right and good with the universe. 7. Quickly, in konsole examine the cur/ directory. You'll see it's _empty_. And there's nothing in new/ or tmp/, either. 8. Before the autosave interval expires, quit kontact. Wait. Restart it. Presto, you'll see that you've lost the in-progress message! Aside from this systematic way to replicate the problem, I should also mention that, over years of using kontact in KDE3, I've also lost in-progress messages after a kontact crash, even ones that had been autosaved previously. It's possible that these "bad" crashes always occurred in the first 1-2 minutes of starting kontact (and thus before the first new autosave), but my memory does not let me be sure of this. I wonder if it might be worth checking to see whether there is a brief moment in which the old autosaved files are deleted but the new ones are not written---if kontact crashes between those events, work is lost. So, to make autosave robust, kontact should: 1. at startup, stop deleting the files corresponding to autosaved messages, or execute autosave immediately after reloading any autosaved messages---that way if kontact crashes in the first minute or two after starting (something I've seen happen more than once...), the user doesn't lose data 2. execute autosave upon quitting (that way any changes that have been made since the last autosave are not lost) 3. in the middle of an autosave, insure that old autosaved files are never deleted until after new ones are written -- Configure bugmail: http://bugs.kde.org/userprefs.cgi?tab=email ------- You are receiving this mail because: ------- You are watching all bug changes.