Closing program gracefully on receiving signal.

[Big O]

On Mon, Dec 1, 2008 at 11:13 AM, Jos Poortvliet <jospoortvliet at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.
Well, technically speaking, anything is possible. But is it feasible?

>
>> Greetings,
>>
>> Gunter Schelfhout
>>