[Gretl-users] unsaved datafile closed w/o asking

[Sven Schreiber]

Am 17.01.2008 21:52, Allin Cottrell schrieb:
> On Thu, 17 Jan 2008, Sven Schreiber wrote:
> 
>>> As a little safety net, couldn't the 'open' command check 
>>> whether the current datafile has unsaved changes, and if so, 
>>> create an automatic backup copy before discarding it?
>> I have been bitten by this again... is there anything wrong 
>> about the idea of automatic backups? Especially now that the 
>> workdir reforms should have ensured that the directory is 
>> writeable.
> 
> Could you give me some context on this -- under what circumstances 
> does the problem arise?

Well I often work in "dual mode", meaning that I am editing a script 
file and doing something via the GUI on the open datafile at the same 
time (or intermittently). Then from time to time it happens that I rerun 
the script file to try out the changes and then what I did last via the 
menus is lost.

The script has an 'open' command to reload the datafile because some 
time ago you recommended that for clearing some gretl internals. Maybe 
this is now simply redundant? Then that would be a workaround. (Although 
I still wouldn't like the idea to automatically discard unsaved changes.)

> 
> The general idea is that scripted actions don't ask for 
> confirmation, and I'd imagine that if one wants to save changes to 
> a datafile in a scripting context one would use "store".
> 
> The backup idea seems a bit backwards to me.  Generally a backup 
> represents the prior state of a file that has been modified: the 
> backup is logically "older" than the non-backup.  But in this case 
> the backup would be newer than the regular file, containing 
> changes that the user had not saved.

Exactly. So it's not really a backup but rather a just-in-case file :-)

thanks,
sven