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List:       koffice-devel
Subject:    Re: Opening the same file twice
From:       Marc Heyvaert <march () taiji ! be>
Date:       2004-03-10 13:09:07
Message-ID: 200403101410.51153.march () taiji ! be
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I posted this message to Friedrich private, should have gone to the mailing 
list.

On Wednesday 10 March 2004 13:50, Marc Heyvaert wrote:
> Hello Thomas, Friedrich and all
>
> On Wednesday 10 March 2004 11:29, you wrote:
> > 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.
>
> I quite like the approach of MS Office where a file can be opened a second
> time, but in read-only mode. Meaning that you can't save it back, but you
> can always save it under another name.
>
> I see two possibilities where the approach of KOffice (and other KDE
> applications) is problematic :
>
> 1. You open a file for which you have no writing permissions. The file
> opens ok, there is no warning, nothing in the titlebar. I would like to see
> there a warning dialog and a permanent reminder of the situation in the
> title bar. Example : /home/march/Documents/abc.ksp - KSpread  <read-only>
>
> 2. You open a file that has already been opened. This is a real life
> situation and even more so in linux than in Windows because most of us work
> on several desktops. When I do portfolio-updates I sometimes open 10 of
> them. In MS-Excel there all on the same desktop, all different windows
> inside the same application (I prefer it that way for this type of work).
> With KSpread you have 10 windows, but if you shuffle your work around on
> your desktops you can easily find yourself editing the same file twice!
> Saving it twice and losing half of your work without being aware of it. So
> this is a second reason why the read-only feature could be helpfull.
>
> As to the way to implement it...there are several ways of doing it. I think
> that checking if you have write permission must be possible, so that covers
> situation 1. For situation 2 a hack could be to write a semaphor file to
> the same directory as the directory of the original file. This file could
> have 0 bytes, same name, same extension + an agreed extra extension.
> Writing this file will be possible because it comes after the check for (1)
> and is only needed in case someone opens the other file for writing. On
> File|Close and File|Quit the semaphor file should be removed.
>
> Regards
>
> Marc
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