Closing program gracefully on receiving signal.

[Jos Poortvliet]

On Fri, Nov 28, 2008 at 9:17 PM, Gunter Schelfhout
<gunter.schelfhout at telenet.be> wrote:
> Hello mailinglist,
>
> Recently I had a spreadsheet open with Kspread when my X-server crashed. No
> input from keyboard or mouse was possible.
> As mostly always is the case with our stable operating system, the kernel
> was doing just fine as I was able to login remotely from another computer.
> But even then I was in a lose-lose situation.
> I could close Kspread before killing and restarting X, or I could go to
> another init-level and go back to level 5.
> But either way I would be losing my changes to my opened spreadsheet.
>
> This could be handled better, I'm afraid.
>
> I'm not a developer  but I know a little of system administration to come to
> the next proposal, although I don't know if it is correct, doable or even
> desirable.
>
> Wouldn't it be a good thing that any program which has an open file in a
> dirty state to close gracefully upon receiving a certain and well documented
> signal?
> Kspread, Kword, Kate, or any other program should then save the file to a
> default destination directory and set an option so the program knows upon
> next start that there was a saving of the document after receiving a signal
> and closing the application. (dirty bit/option)
>
> Perhaps this could be programmed as central and low as possible (maybe
> kdeinit?), so that the developer of the application doesn't have to worry
> about it.
> I know some applications have the autosave option, but even then you would
> lose some data and not all applications which have the opportunity to edit
> some data have this option.

It should be possible to instruct the application from the commandline
using DBUS to save & quit, at least as long as the file has a name.
Furthermore, KDE applications are slowly gaining crash-recovery
functionality (Konqi has it now) which would help even more. Yeah,
having such functionality kind'of default, in the libraries - sounds
good, but I have no idea if that would be even possible, technically
speaking.

> Greetings,
>
> Gunter Schelfhout
>
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