[Github-comments] [geany] Geany hangs on saving a certain file (reproducible) (#815)

[elextr]

> If the popup dialogue already has a "Save As" button, it would more convenient to use.

Yes it would, but the impact may be a significant refactoring of the save code, since ATM `save-as` calls the normal `save` after it figures out the new name, but since `save` is not re-entrant it can't be called from a `save-as` which was called from `save`.  And that also makes another loop, though at least it has a user action in it.

The last thing a plugin would want to do is to re-implement save, remember there are three options that control how its done, each of which has a different use-case so it will reduce the utility of the plugin if they are not all available.  Also "save" isn't just writing the buffer to the file, there is the issue of encoding, and handling bad characters, and BOMs etc. 

And performing file metadata checks portably is not easy, and then they can be wrong if you are not fareful, we have had issues with remote filesystem data caches giving bad data (though hopefully we have solved that now).  It is not sensible to re-do that all in a plugin.

Yes, it is possible to change the API, but that then affects all the other plugins that use it.  Adding new API is also possible, but again that needs changes to Geany to make the new and old API work together.

And lastly save is a *critical* function as you have pointed out, we need to be very careful making changes to it, we don't want to introduce bugs in the normal save operations, that could affect *ME* :). 
Care is needed especially since its not as straightforward as it seems as noted above.  To quote a former Geany maintainer "Who knew that simply writing a file was so hard" ( :tm: Enrico)

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https://github.com/geany/geany/issues/815#issuecomment-165030367
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