mailing-list for TeXmacs Users

[Luca <address@hidden>]

Joris van der Hoeven wrote:

> Hello Luca,
>
> On Mon, 31 Jan 2005, Luca wrote:
>  
>
> > Today  I had my first bad surprise after 2 years of daily use of TeXmacs.
> > I was working on a document since this morning with the auto-save option
> > enabled and I saved it several times. Half an hour ago I finished it and
> > decided to run a spell check befor printing it and texmacs crashed suddenly.
> > I was not so preocupied as I thought I just had to restart the spell
> > check but when I opende again the file it was in this morning state with
> > no sign of modification and the autosave file was the one of yesterday
> > night.... So all the work lost.... Did anyone experienced this before?
> > I don't know what had happend since everything was looking normal before
> > the crash.
> >    
>
> I am very sorry, but this sounds quite strange to me. Are you able to
> reliably reproduce this bug, in which case I will do my best to correct
> it as soon as possible?
>
> Even when something went wrong during the auto-saving, I still do not
> understand why the harddisk version did not change when you explicitly
> saved the file several times. Can there be something wrong with your
> quota or write permissions?
>
>  
>
> > Any hint on how to recover the file?
> > I think that a bug like this one should be absolutly eliminated... How
> > can I track such situation?
> >    
>
> If it really is a bug, then I agree? In principle, as soon as your file
> has a valid name "blah.tm", then autosaving regularly takes place in
> "blah.tm~". But things may go wrong when you change permissions or
> when the directory which contains your file is physically moved.
> In that case, the status bar should contain an error message though
> when you attempt to save your document (also for autosaving, I believe).
>
>  
>
> > It look like something veryu strange a full day saying that the document
> > was saved without having write a single bit....
> > I hope we can figure out what happend
> >    
>
> So do I, --Joris
>
>
>  
I figured out what happend.....
The directory I was working was mounted remotely via nfs through the 
automount daemon and got unmounted while I was working.
So Texmacs directly saved the file and its autosaved version under the  
mountpoint on the local disk and  when I  again opened the directory 
through nautilus after the crash the automounter mounted the remote 
disk  again and I didn't see any file...
I guess that Texmacs doesn't  lock the directory on which it works so 
automounter automatically unmount it after 10 minutes of inactivity, 
probably it is also related to the fact I opened the  file through 
nautilus and the pwd of texmacs was the default one and  not  the one in 
which the file was.
I don't know if it is a feature or a bug.


So the story has an happy end....
Now the question is:
Is there any way to inform texmacs that the directory you are opening 
the file from is on a remote server  so that if it is unmounted it warns 
you and you can save to another location? OR should it lock the 
directory to prevent the automounter demon from unmounting  it? Or 
should the pwd of Texmacs when opened from nautilus or similar programs 
be set to the one of the opened file?

PS
I really hope you will forget the subject of my first message as "really 
disappointed" sound to me wrong. THis doesn't correspond to the feeling 
I have for TeXmacs as since I discovered it  I found it incredibly 
necessary for my work and fantastic. However surely you know how one 
feels after loosing a day of work when already out of schedule...
I love TeXmacs and trust it so much that I thought it wasn't possible 
what seemed to have happened and in fact after trying to figure all the 
possiblities out  I stopped the automounter daemon and discovered the files.

Thank you for your suggestions hope at least this can help to other in 
similar situations
Luca Tagliacozzo