mailing-list for TeXmacs Users

[Joris van der Hoeven <address@hidden>]

On Tue, 1 Feb 2005, Luca wrote:
> >"blah.tm~". But things may go wrong when you change permissions or
> >when the directory which contains your file is physically moved.
>
> 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.

TeXmacs currently just stores the complete file name and tries to
write to it when saving. I think this is the most natural behaviour,
but we might issue a clearly visible warning if something "strange"
happened (to be defined more precisely).

More generally, we should probably use popup windows for really
important messages. I think that many people do not keep an eye
on the status bar.

> 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?

Something like this should probably be implemented indeed.

> 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.

The main thing is that your problem is solved now.
This really would have been a very bad bug.

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

Thanks for reporting your experience, Joris