On Fri, 2006-01-06 at 14:01 -0500, Lee Revell wrote:
On Fri, 2006-01-06 at 10:31 -0600, Jeff Nelson wrote:I shut down my notebook without first exiting evolution and that lead to the new corruption. Deleting the index files caused new ones to be generated.Why can't Linux handle this gracefully like Windows? On that OS when I shut down all the apps are closed in an orderly fashion, with an opportunity to save any unsaved work, etc. On Linux it seems to just blithely kill everything.
This is of course completely rubbish. When your shutting down, you're supposed to first log out of your X session, which will definitely signal your apps to clean up and go away, because they don't have a display to work on, anymore. If they do not react, that is definitely a bug in the application. Then, if you didn't choose to log out first, but type "shutdown" or "init 0" in a X window, it still works. Either X is killed before your apps (which is very likely) and exactly the same happens as when you're logging out of an X session. Otherwise, the app gets killed, but note: it's killed using signal 15 (TERM). Any app that has any cleanup to do at exit, should catch this signal, do it's thing and then exit cleanly. Especially for apps that do catch the signal but then crash and never really exit, a second round of killing is issued after a short period. Now the applications are sent a 9 (KILL) signal, which they cannot catch, so the application is really killed. In a "normal" situation no apps are killed in this round, because they are already gone. It is very important that ALL processes all killed because otherwise the disks cannot be unmounted, which is far worse than a process being killed. This procedure has been the same since the very start of general available linux (~12 years ago). Current windows versions from that time only sent a message to all applications to clean up and exit, at shutdown. When any one application/process did not respond, there was no way you could shut down the computer, other than power cycling. Now THAT is really bad, because it leads to corrupted disks. Anyway, I have had evolution killed and exited non-gracefully for many many times, and this has never caused any corruption. I very much suspect the OP has disk corruption from power cycling. Evolution really can't do anything about that, only fsck can (but not always).
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