From xemacs-m  Sun Apr 20 08:15:44 1997
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Date: Sun, 20 Apr 1997 09:15:34 -0400
Message-Id: <199704201315.AA282022134@martigny.ai.mit.edu>
From: Bill Dubuque <wgd@martigny.ai.mit.edu>
To: steve@miranova.com
Cc: xemacs-beta@xemacs.org, ben@666.com, jwz@netscape.com,
        wgd@martigny.ai.mit.edu
In-Reply-To: <m2ohba2i19.fsf@altair.xemacs.org> (message from Steven L Baur on
	20 Apr 1997 01:52:02 -0700)
Subject: Re: autosave [Jamie Zawinski <jwz@netscape.com>]

Steven L Baur <steve@miranova.com> wrote to xemacs-beta on 20 Apr 1997:
| 
| The motion is put forward to enable autosaving in recovered buffers.
| I'm inclined to agree with him, but as always I am open to discussion.

I think this is probably the correct thing to do since, conceptually,
you should be in the same state after a recover-file as you were before
the Emacs crash (so auto-save should still be on).

However, unless this was a fluke, someone explicitly decided NOT to 
re-enable auto-save after a recover-file so it would be worthwhile
to try to figure out why they made this decision. Is there some
screw case we are overlooking?

Another problem, even more serious in my mind, is that you can lose
your precious autosave file if you accidentally spazz and edit the
buffer before you have a chance to recover. E.g. if after C-x C-f
you spazz and insert a char then the autosave is lost (maybe this
has been fixed since last time I looked?). I think that one should
have to explicitly answer a yes-or-no query before one is allowed
to modify a file when a newer autosave exists. Note that one
will not necessarily have seen the message warning that a newer
autosave exists: e.g. if the file was loaded earlier say by a
tags-search command: this loads a bunch of files at once and
you don't have a chance to pause at each file and recover, the
warnings simply stream by in the echo area and you might miss 
them or later forget which files have newer autosaves, etc. 
The warning/query should occur at the point where the autosave
file is about to be lost, not only when the file is first loaded 
into a buffer. The user should have to make an EXPLICIT decision
to discard the newer changes in the autosave file.

-Bill Dubuque

Date: Fri, 18 Apr 1997 19:20:39 -0700
From: Jamie Zawinski <jwz@netscape.com>

I wrote:
> 
> I don't think 19.15 does an auto-save when it gets a kill signal...

Ok, I have a second theory; I think that it might be that the file that
didn't get saved was one that I had previously recovered from an
auto-save file -- which may mean that auto-save mode got turned off in
that buffer, sigh.

I think that if a file has been recovered, and then *saved*, that
auto-save mode ought to come back on.  Actually, it's not clear to me
that auto-save mode should be turned off in the first place.  I know
emacs has done that forever, but I can't erally imagine a scenario where
it would be helpful.

       == Jamie (who just lost two hours work)


