auto-save questions.

["C. Scott Ananian" <cananian lesser-magoo lcs mit edu>]

I've been reviewing the emacs implementation of auto-save to guide my
gnumeric improvement efforts.

Most auto-save systems have the odd property that if you start up a second
copy of the application while you have unsaved changes in the documents
open in the first copy, the second copy will ask you if you want to
'recover' the unsaved changes from the other application, since it can't
tell whether the first app if still present or has crashed.  Emacs does
this, although you usually don't notice it because its recovery reminder
is very quiet.  But:
% emacs foo &
[add some text to foo, then wait a while until you see #foo# in the
directory]
% emacs foo
[sure enough, the second instance of emacs asks if you want to recover
foo, even though the first instance is still running.]

Thoughts about this for gnumeric?  Should we ignore this situation?
Should we attempt to determine if there's already a running instance of
gnumeric (and what if the running instance is on another X display?)
(and is there a good way to do this in GNOME?)

Thoughts?
  --scott

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              ( http://lesser-magoo.lcs.mit.edu/~cananian )