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List:       koffice-devel
Subject:    Re: Opening the same file twice
From:       "Friedrich W. H.  Kossebau" <Friedrich.W.H () Kossebau ! de>
Date:       2004-03-10 11:29:11
Message-ID: 200403101229.11179.Friedrich.W.H () Kossebau ! de
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Am Mittwoch, 10. März 2004 11:41 schrieb Marc Heyvaert:
> Hello,
>
> In KOffice you can open a file more than once in write mode.
>
> So if you open a file twice, make some changes to one copy and save it an
> quit this one the other is still open and with the older, obsolete data. So
> the danger exists that after a while you start working again in this
> obsolete data.
>
> There is a security issue here.

Less security, more annoyity (well, consistency in fact) ;)

> Has this issue come up before? Wouldn't it be possible to force a read-only
> situation as in MS Excel? is it possible to open a file read-only in
> KOffice?

KDE or the computing world in general lacks some file handling policy AFAIK. 
You will find all kind of variations how to cope with the consistency 
problem. But I haven't seen a solution yet that really is sufficient.

One solution would be some file handle center that could tell you if a file is 
already loaded (and modified in the memory copy) by another app (which might 
belong into the os, of course). You can lock files in unix, too. But I don't 
remember a way to get the information who locked a file (one could use 
metadata for this). So KWord has no chance to see that a file is already 
loaded by, say, OO.o and to tell you about this. 

An even better solution IMHO would be some database  layer that has 
mimetype-specific loaders which export handlers to the mimetype document 
which is extracted of a file. So you always have only one copy of a file in 
memory (the model) to which you connect with some views. 
But I am only dreaming. Computing in unix has a history of batch job handling, 
operating in parallel on the same data has not been foreseen... 

Friedrich
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