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

[rovf]

>  But you are the only one who has reported this issue, so it seems like it simply isn't happening in the real world as often as network filesystem glitches.

I think, with bugs in general, frequency of occurance is hard to guess. For example, in the majority of my past projects, I was the only one who actually *reported* issues with software. Most other people either ignored the problem, or switch to a different software. Especially in the case of a free text editor, by far most users who experience this kind of problem more than once, will simple turn to a different program.

> What I am objecting to is suggestions that make the plugin stop working when it fails

It doesn't need to "stop working". If the plugin catches the error - in the way I outlined above - and displays its own error message ("Plugin can not save this time because the file is locked"), the user knows what's going on. The plugin needs to make sure that the clock counting until the next attempt of saving the file, is reset to zero when the user clicks the OK button of the pop-up message. He has then time to save the file under a different name (if he sees no possibility to remove the lock).

> I think people who edit over flakey network links [just to save themselves copying the file] deserve what they lose

I don't know to what extent the network is flakey, but in many companies, it is strongly discouraged to have *any* file on your local drive (becaue it doesn't get up). In my case it is an exception that the majority of my files is local, and I care about my own backup, but it is not the usual way. The problem is not so much editing over the network, but editing files which are accessible to many people, and of course this can lead to race conditions, which would also exist if I would copy the file to my local disk, and write it back when I'm done. Here too, there is not much an individual programmer can do against it.

> Sadly finding out that files are on a network share is not portably possible

Well, we are talking about Windows here (I never experienced similar problems when working on Linux), and I think there must be a fairly reliable way to find out, whether the file is on a network: If I type 'net use' on the command line, I can see from the format of the output, whether a drive letter points to a local directory or to somewhere on the network, and if the path is not specified with a drive letter, but as an UNC path, it always can be treated as being on the network. 

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Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub:
https://github.com/geany/geany/issues/815#issuecomment-165389132
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