Lost settings on abnormal shutdown

[Mark Kretschmann]

On Sat, Oct 17, 2009 at 9:24 AM, Michael Liddle <michael at liddle.net.nz> wrote:
> I reported a bug a while back
> (https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=198987) about how various settings
> seem to get lost whenever amarok is terminated in any way other than by
> right-click -> Quit on the systray icon.
>
> Anyway I just updated to 2.2, and still get the problem. While it may be
> a KDE/Qt problem, it does only happen to me in Amarok.
>
> Does anyone here have any ideas on what might be going on? Since I don't
> see others complaining, and as it's quite a pain, I've been presuming
> that I'm in a minority of people affected by this. Is this the case?
>
> Any tips would be greatly appreciated.

Well. Amarok remembers _some_ "settings" after a crash, but not all.
Let me go into more detail:

What we do store immediately (syncing HDD) is all normal settings from
the "Configure Amarok" dialog. As soon as you press "Ok" or "Apply",
those are stored on your harddisk.

However, some things are not stored immediately, partly for
performance reasons, and partly because we forgot (detailed hints
welcome). One example of data that is not stored immediately is the
current playlist. Some users have giant playlists (like 10,000
tracks), which I find a bit crazy, but that's how things are. Storing
this after each modification is quite slow, performance wise. It could
be done, but it's complicated. I have some ideas for implementing this
in the future.

I should also mention that with traditional application design such
data is always stored on shutdown. Only lately it has become a trend
to store this data immediately, as it makes things crash persistent.
Generally I think this is a good trend.


Alright, I hope I managed to explain this properly. Any more questions?

-- 
Mark Kretschmann
Amarok Developer
www.kde.org - amarok.kde.org