[Bf-committers] Handling of user data.

[Harley Acheson]

I’d love to have someone flesh out this “warning on quit” idea, because I
can’t imagine it actually
working in practice.  Mostly because of confusion on what “saving” really
means. Users should
rightfully only consider that “saving their data” does exactly that, not
that some of their data might
differ and have to be “saved” in different ways.

As its simplest, imagine that you have no unsaved changes in your file (you
just did a File/Save)
yet there is orphaned data at the time you select “Quit”.  What exactly
does the warning say?
“You have unlinked data that will be lost”?  How do you communicate to the
user what they should
do now?  Is there a way to offer to do it for them somehow, or is this
warning going to just have an
“Ignore” and “Cancel” button? Text that says “please mark anything you want
to keep by marking
the data with ‘fake user’”? That will not help a typical person being
caught out by this

Now imagine there are both unsaved changes and orphan data at the point of
“quit”.  We now
have to warn about unsaved changes that can be “saved” and there are other
things that should
be “saved” in a different way before you “save” so that they are actually
“saved”. So we have a
button to cancel, one to save the unsaved changes while ignoring orphan
data, and what else
is on the dialog?

I'm not sure there is sufficient lipstick that can be put on this pig.

Harley