Fwd: Many thanks for full buffering.

[Ralf Nolden]

FYI :) 

----------  Forwarded Message  ----------

Subject: Many thanks for full buffering.
Date: Dienstag, 10. Juni 2003 21:33
From: Tony O'Bryan <TO'Bryan at greenecountymo.org>
To: nolden at kde.org

Here's a story for why I hope you -never- get rid of full buffering for all
source files:

I work for county government in Missouri, and had spent a full week
 developing a Qt-based utility for the county detectives and sheriff patrol
 officers to manage their digital camera photos.  I'm fortunate enough to
 have convinced my workplace to buy a Qt developer's license for my use at
 work, so I'm able to use KDevelop as my IDE under Mandrake.  Since I'm using
 Linux for development, I never exit from KDevelop or Qt Designer.  Both have
 been running flawlessly 24x7 for a few weeks.

I had finished writing the program, and needed to start the work of
recompiling the camera software under Windows.  I had archived the project
using KDE's right-click menu interface to Ark, but had also archived all the
object files.  Since I didn't want the Linux binaries in the archive, which I
made solely to transfer the project over the network to my Windows machine, I
wanted to delete the archive and "make clean" the project.

I highlighted the archive and pressed shift-delete to delete it.  I didn't
realize until it was too late that I also had the root of my project source
tree highlighted at the time I deleted the archive, so everything was erased.
I had a backup from a few days ago, but I had done extensive work since then
and wasn't looking forward to rewriting it.

Since I had Qt Designer open still, I was able to resave the existing .ui
files instead of having to redesign them.  I then resaved the implementation
file that was currently displayed within KDevelop, which happened to be the
file on which I had done the most tedious work.  I just assumed that the
header file was a lost cause, so when I clicked on it to redeclare my methods
and variables, I didn't really pay attention to the dialog that popped up.
The only part of it I actuall read was asking if I wanted to reload from
disk.  Not thinking about it, I said yes and redeclared my missing variables
and methods.

Then I clicked on another file, saw that same familiar dialog, and this time
stopped to read it.  It's the one that says that the in-memory buffer differs
from the disk image, and should the disk image be reloaded.  That piqued my
interest, so I wanted to see what would happen if I said no.  Lo and behold,
the final working copy of my source code appeared.  After saving the file, I
tried the same thing with another class file.  The same wonderful thing
happened.  I repeated this for every class in the project, and was able to
recover the entire deleted project.

To say I was thrilled is a monumental understatement.  Having gone from the
thought that several days of hard work were lost all the way to the
realization that the entire project was recovered because KDevelop buffers
everything is a feeling of elation to which I could not do justice.

The bottom line is that I hope you -never- take full project buffering out of
KDevelop.  Whether that feature was intentional of just a happy side effect,
it was a life saver.

Thanks a million!

-------------------------------------------------------

-- 
We're not a company, we just produce better code at less costs.
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Ralf Nolden
nolden at kde.org

The K Desktop Environment       The KDevelop Project
http://www.kde.org              http://www.kdevelop.org
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