On Thu, Feb 2, 2012 at 3:51 AM, Nick Treleaven nick.treleaven@btinternet.com wrote:
On 31/01/2012 23:09, Lex Trotman wrote:
Confusing the user is also harm. A (paranoid) user may worry some other file
got truncated.
Ok, better put the filename in the message then, but preventing the message in the case where it is probable that actual harm has been done is really bad.
It would still confuse the user. Why tell the user something worrying that may well not be the case?
So why did you add a "may" message in the first place :)
I still contend that it is more bad to hide a possibly valid damage warning than to cause consternation by a possibly invalid message.
BTW do you agree/disagree with:
I'd agree that I (like you) would *expect* it, but sadly I don't think thats the case in the real world.
I'm not sure we can assume all users are fully cogniscent of the fact that things are remote, NFS and samba mounts do a good job of hiding remoteness, but they still fail more often (in my experience) than out of disk happens. And to a user plugging in a NAS device is just the same as plugging in a USB disk isn't it? After all it is attached to the machine? Look its my g: drive!
Come to think of it, USB disks can have the plug bumped etc. There are lots of ways for temporary failures to happen long before we get to things as "exotic" as ssh or ftp connections beneath GVFS mounts that Colomban wants to make easier! (see other thread).
For non-C/system programmers, the idea that a save error could indicate truncation of the existing file can be, at best somewhat hazy, and at worst totally foreign, and Geany has grown way beyond just C/system programmers.
When writing to a networked file I would expect users to take more notice of error messages, i.e. they should expect a save error might cause truncation.
Cheers Lex