Lost settings on abnormal shutdown

[Michael Liddle]

(Resending to list too, sorry Mark)

Mark Kretschmann wrote:
> However, some things are not stored immediately, partly for
> performance reasons, and partly because we forgot (detailed hints
> welcome). 

Major one's I've noticed:

- Changes to widgets (added/removed/moved)
- Changes to the main window layout (i.e. the new dockable panels in 2.2)
- Playlist (see below)

Album covers seems to have been fixed in 2.2.

> 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.

Hmmm... well the rationale here seems fairly sound: incremental saving
of these settings shouldn't be particularly noticable to the user.
Although, I'm with you on the massive playlist being a bit crazy (though
I do listen to much music on a fairly "traditional" album-by-album
basis). Thinking of myself mostly (I rarely have more than 200 tracks in
the playlist), would it be possible to save the playlist immediately if
it's less than a certain size?

> 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.

While crash resistance would definitely be cool, the major one for me is
 when I log out. If I didn't explicitly quit amarok from the systray,
all of the above are lost. I don't know how it works (TERM signal?), but
it'd be great if its possible to handle this like a "normal" shutdown.

Thanks,
Mike.

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