kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Adam Wolf <adamwolf@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I have found them more confusing than valuable, both when working on
projects and when teaching folks and they're curious about each of the new
files.

I guess we can be glad that the state of user backup/VCS is better now than
a decade ago!  I tend to have little hope for things like that, but hey!

On Mon, Jun 29, 2020, 2:33 PM Jon Evans <jon@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> That save process change is what I was referring to in (2)
>
> The old save process (in 5.1 and earlier) is:
>
> 1) Move (not copy) filename.ext to filename.ext-bak
> 2) Write the save to filename.ext (a new file at this point)
>
> Our current save process (in nightlies) is:
>
> 1) Copy filename.ext to filename.ext-bak
> 2) Write to .filename.ext$ (a temporary file)
> 3) If everything worked, move .filename.ext$ to filename.ext
> (overwrites the old file)
>
> There is no need to delete anything: if the save works, the move
> option effectively deletes the temporary file.  If the save doesn't
> work, the old file is untouched.
>
> On Mon, Jun 29, 2020 at 3:27 PM Andrew Zonenberg
> <azonenberg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >
> > I find them annoying and have to add them to my gitignore's etc
> constantly.
> >
> > They're of no value to me because I tend to save every 30 seconds or so
> > while working.
> >
> > The *one* thing they might be useful for is guarding against kicad
> > segfaulting or other failures (disk full, NFS connection lost, etc)
> > during the save process itself. To do this, I'd suggest:
> >
> > * Move old file to file.bak
> > * Write new file
> > * Delete old file if everything worked. If something goes wrong before
> > reaching this point, you can restore from the bak.
> >
> > On 6/29/20 12:23 PM, Jon Evans wrote:
> > > Currently, KiCad automatically creates backups of schematic and PCB
> > > files when you save a file.
> > >
> > > The logic for these backups is basically: if a file already exists
> > > with the same name as what we are saving, copy that file to a new file
> > > and give it the "-bak" suffix on the file extension.
> > >
> > > These backups are stored next to the original file in the current
> > > KiCad codebase.  This understandably creates clutter that some people
> > > don't like (myself included) so in the project-settings branch that is
> > > about ready to be merged, I changed this behavior to place all these
> > > backups in a special backups folder for the project.
> > >
> > > This proved to have some complications around the handling of files
> > > outside the project path (which it's possible to have with
> > > hierarchical schematic sheets) so I need to do something else.
> > >
> > > After some thought, I am pretty convinced that the right thing to do
> > > is just *remove this backup feature entirely*.  Here's why:
> > >
> > > 1) It's not a very good backup:  It just stores the state from the
> > > last time you hit "save".  If you hit save again, your backup is blown
> > > up.  So, it's really like a "undo" function, but on disk, and with
> > > only one level of undo.
> > >
> > > 2) Recently I changed how we save schematic and board files to fix
> > > some unrelated issues people were seeing with cloud backup services.
> > > Before this change, if KiCad crashed or had some other serious error
> > > while saving a file, the file would be lost (because we used to delete
> > > the old file and then write a new one in its place).  After this
> > > change, we write the new file to a temporary location, and only if
> > > that write succeeds do we copy it on top of the old file.  I think
> > > this vulnerability to generating corrupt files if we crash was one of
> > > the reasons for this backup file system, and that reason is now gone.
> > >
> > > 3) Because it's not a very good backup, I worry that the fact that
> > > "bak" files exist might cause some users to have a false sense of
> > > security and not use a true backup system (like a version control
> > > system, or some other mechanism that actually backs up files
> > > periodically).  I want to remove this false sense of security so that
> > > it is more clear that users should back up their files in some way if
> > > they care about the work.
> > >
> > > In other words, I don't think this feature actually gives enough value
> > > to make it worth the clutter in the project folder and/or the
> > > development effort to make it work well with less clutter.
> > >
> > > So, I'd like to hear from others on this: anyone disagree?
> > >
> > > Thanks,
> > > Jon
> > >
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>
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