autosave [LWN.net]

autosave

Posted Jun 9, 2022 18:24 UTC (Thu) by giraffedata (guest, #1954)
In reply to: Per-file OOM badness by marcH
Parent article: Per-file OOM badness

I think a better description than "archaic form of version control / undo" is "simple commit/rollback control."

I rely heavily on that; I'd be really pissed if a new version of a document editor started committing my work, overwriting my last good version, when I'm halfway through an update.

Of course, if I were a brand new user who had not yet developed the discipline of frequent checkpointing (saving), I suppose I would appreciate the system clicking "save" for me periodically, and then I could turn that feature off after I learn there's a better way.

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autosave

Posted Jun 10, 2022 7:32 UTC (Fri) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

As someone who has (at work) found myself moving to cloud documents, yes "autosave" does mean "update the current version of the doc", but it also means "take a checkpoint", "update the doc with other peoples' changes", and maybe more. It's interesting (and actually very useful), in a meeting, having three or four people update the same document, at the same time ...

You just need to change your mindset, although it's also annoyingly frustrating when you want to make temporary changes, and you can't ...

Cheers,
Wol

autosave

Posted Jun 10, 2022 14:54 UTC (Fri) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link] (15 responses)

Why the need to manually checkpoint at specific times when "undo" checkpoints everything all the time?

This really sounds like a niche use case, are you running a test suite on your Word-like documents?

If you do, Word and others support versionimg now, so you can upgrade to "save version", keep autosave on, not risk losing anything if your computer crashes and collaborate in real time. Welcome to the 21st century.

autosave

Posted Jun 10, 2022 18:48 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (guest, #1954) [Link] (14 responses)

Undo does not checkpoint at meaningful stages.

This is the scenario: I decide to restructure a table. Five minutes into it, I figure out it's not as easy as I thought and I have just made a mess and want to go back to the original table. I was careful not to save because I knew I might need to go back and it's a bigger risk to screw up my document because of my own miscalculation than to lose five minutes of work if the system crashes. How many times do I click Undo to get back to where I was before I started messing with the table? It could be dozens. But I can easily toss out all the changes I haven't committed yet.

And what if the system crashes? Now I have a corrupted table and Undo history probably won't be there after restart.

I work this way as a matter of course when editing almost everything -- documents, code, spreadsheets, ... It's not a niche for me.

autosave

Posted Jun 10, 2022 21:05 UTC (Fri) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link] (8 responses)

Just go back to the venerable 1960's way of emulating version control: copy the table and work on the copy and delete the original if you accept it. Sure, those nerds have Git and fancy things, but they're so hard to use; I prefer juggling these bowling balls instead.

(There may or may not be any sarcasm here.)

autosave

Posted Jun 10, 2022 22:05 UTC (Fri) by pebolle (guest, #35204) [Link] (7 responses)

> (There may or may not be any sarcasm here.)

But there sure was trolling.

autosave

Posted Jun 14, 2022 20:39 UTC (Tue) by jschrod (subscriber, #1646) [Link] (6 responses)

Why? Directly below, marcH recommended that method.

I'm glad that I still use emacs for documents, which has both autosave and a different "real" save action. It's much more flexible.

autosave

Posted Jun 14, 2022 23:59 UTC (Tue) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link] (5 responses)

Of course making copy seems very "primitive" compared to proper version control.

Yet a copy may be faster and more convenient if it's only for a very short term and throw-away safety before doing something quick and a bit "dangerous". Combined with autosave it's also safer than holding back a manual save (no loss on crash or user error) and barely more effort. It's not mutually exclusive with proper version control.

The best tool for the job and manual saves offer very little advantages in very few situations.

autosave

Posted Jun 15, 2022 0:27 UTC (Wed) by jschrod (subscriber, #1646) [Link] (4 responses)

I have to apologize for my comment that may be interpreted as a snide remark. It was not meant as that -- though, in hindsight, it looks like it does.

Of course, making explicit copies (or intermediate explicit copies) is a most valuable tool. I use it often, myself. Involving git in that moment is too much work afterwards, frankly.

My comment was a reaction to the opinion of pebolle that "making explicit intermediate copies" is a troll argument. Which it is not at all -- and I think, we agree on that. It was a spontaneous reaction and not formulated adequately, please accept my apologies.

What irks me in this discussion: There are really experienced folks who thinks that the difference between autosave and an explicit save is not necessary; any change is immediately applied to the original document. (I experience that with Google Docs, and it's horrible.) In our software development activities, we have now version control systems that differentiate between commit and push and allow rebasing in between. Do you remember SVN? A bad commit happened and you cannot change it because it was immediately pushed to the centreal repository. WTF? Today we have better tools.

How can anybody who is used to such a fine and flexible software development workflow, as exemplified by git, think that it's not necessary to have the same control over the change process of one's document content?

autosave

Posted Jun 15, 2022 1:40 UTC (Wed) by giraffedata (guest, #1954) [Link] (2 responses)

Some people here think hardly anyone benefits from explicit save and that hardly anyone wants it. I'm not convinced anyone here knows any more than I do about what everyone wants (and I assume I'm far from alone in highly valuing explicit save), but here is some evidence in the form of expensive engineering that has been done to support explicit save that explicit savers are legion:

Products that autosave usually provide a way to turn it off. And they usually tell you (warn you) that they are autosaving.

And here's a gem I recently discovered in Microsoft Word: My editing session got interrupted. When I restarted, Word said to me, "I automatically saved some of your work since you last saved. Would you like to keep that?" I said Hell no because I didn't know what half-baked change of mine it might have saved, but on other occasions I surely would have said yes.

Making a copy before starting a change and doing explicit version control with something like Git is impractical. I sometimes hit ctl-S (Emacs ctl-X ctl-S) multiple times a minute.

autosave

Posted Jun 15, 2022 8:43 UTC (Wed) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

> And here's a gem I recently discovered in Microsoft Word: My editing session got interrupted. When I restarted, Word said to me, "I automatically saved some of your work since you last saved. Would you like to keep that?" I said Hell no because I didn't know what half-baked change of mine it might have saved, but on other occasions I surely would have said yes.

That's been there a while.

The *problem* with auto-save is that I can no longer "quit without saving"! That is functionality I sometimes *desire*, even before I start my edit. Sometimes I want to play before starting work in earnest. I can no longer do that ...

Cheers,
Wol

autosave

Posted Jun 16, 2022 22:29 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

> Making a copy before starting a change and doing explicit version control with something like Git is impractical. I sometimes hit ctl-S (Emacs ctl-X ctl-S) multiple times a minute.

Automate it! (In particular, see 'magit-wip-mode'.)

autosave

Posted Jun 15, 2022 8:21 UTC (Wed) by pebolle (guest, #35204) [Link]

> My comment was a reaction to the opinion of pebolle that "making explicit intermediate copies" is a troll argument.

My beef was the wording of marcH's comment. It seemed chosen to trigger the recipient - whom I know to be polite and focussed on the subject at hand - into replying over the top too.

(For the record: I actually have no opinion on the pros and cons of autosave.)

autosave

Posted Jun 11, 2022 0:04 UTC (Sat) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link] (4 responses)

Maybe not "niche" but for sure it is not the most common activity in a text document. When undo is not enough, simply use version control or its grand daddy: make a copy. Done.

Like it or not the "save" button is disappearing really fast and very few people struggle to switch to the new, more powerful and more flexible ways.

autosave

Posted Jun 11, 2022 12:18 UTC (Sat) by rschroev (subscriber, #4164) [Link] (3 responses)

> Like it or not the "save" button is disappearing really fast and very few people struggle to switch to the new, more powerful and more flexible ways.

The way I see it, the new ways are more convenient for most use cases and may well be the way forward, but the old way with the save button is the one that is more powerful and more flexible (but requires the user to have a bit more discipline).

autosave

Posted Jun 11, 2022 13:30 UTC (Sat) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

> the new ways are more convenient for *MOST* use cases

Emphasis added ...

Cheers,
Wol

autosave

Posted Jun 13, 2022 12:43 UTC (Mon) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link] (1 responses)

Of course, there's the issue that showed up on a machine I was helping out with where MS Office lost the ability to "Save As" (the directory selection never showed up). This was…OK, but when it lost even "Save", the only way to save work was:

- autosave to OneDrive (could not choose a local directory AFAICT) behind a Microsoft account
- "Send" the document over email then save the attachment from the draft message
- reinstall MS Office (which forced an upgrade)

There are all kinds of complexities involved in this new mechanism and I'm sure all kinds of new bugs will show up because of it too. I love how companies seem to be ensuring future prospects by deleting working code in preference for new, buggy code.

autosave

Posted Jun 13, 2022 13:30 UTC (Mon) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

> I love how companies seem to be ensuring future prospects by deleting working code in preference for new, buggy code.

The problem, of course, is when your working code stops working because of a forced upgrade somewhere else.

I'm now an Excel VBA programmer in practice - oh how I wish I could push all that crap into a decent database ...

(And no, I don't fancy the politics that would entail ...)

Cheers,
Wol