Re: [Audacity-quality] "Delete orphaned files (safe and recommended)"

[Gale A. <ga...@au...>]

| From Steve the Fiddle <ste...@gm...> 
| Wed, 3 Nov 2010 22:34:58 +0000
| Subject: [Audacity-quality] "Delete orphaned files (safe and recommended)"
> "Delete orphaned files (safe and recommended)"
> Under what circumstances is it safe and/or recommended?
> From my own experience, and from numerous posts on the forum it is
> profoundly unsafe and to be avoided as it destroys the last ditch hope
> of salvaging data from a broken project.
>
| From Steve the Fiddle <ste...@gm...> 
| Wed, 3 Nov 2010 23:39:53 +0000
| Subject: [Audacity-quality] "Delete orphaned files (safe and recommended)"
> On Wed, Nov 3, 2010 at 11:11 PM, Bill Wharrie <bi...@go...> wrote:
> > ... If the files are "orphaned" that means there is no reference to them
> > in the AUP file. The only time you wouldn't want to delete the
> > orphaned files is if you were prepared to manually stitch those
> > orphaned files back into your project - a non-trivial undertaking.
> > There is no way to automatically stitch the .au files of a 1.3.x
> > project back together the way there was for 1.2.
> >
> > -- Bill
> 
> Certainly it is a non-trivial undertaking, but providing the data has
> not been erased it is not impossible.
> 
> On the grounds of "difficulty", the error message could say something like:
> "Orphaned block files detected. If this is a result of a crash it will
> be extremely difficult salvage any of this data. Delete? Yes/No"
> rather than saying that it is "Safe" to delete the files.
> 
> The message is also used in Audacity 1.2.x where crash recovery tools
> do exist, so "difficulty" is clearly not the reason for the current
> wording.

Steve, 

This was (at least mostly) fixed in the course of Vaughan's work on
Bug 113 (Dependencies dialogue not safe against user error): 
http://bugzilla.audacityteam.org/show_bug.cgi?id=113

See here for how the "Orphan Blockfile(s)" dialogue looks in SVN HEAD:
http://www.gaclrecords.org.uk/orphan_message.png

I would possibly argue we shouldn't say that orphans "should be deleted" 
while we still have Bug 137 "Unreliable project re-opening with orphaned 
and missing blockfile errors", but we aren't now saying against the radio 
button that deletion is "safe and recommended". 

Please see the comments between Vaughan and myself in Bug 113
for how decisions were made. As Bug 113 is still stuck on "devel-fix
made", I'd really welcome you and Bill giving it a good testing on
Linux and (especially important) Mac. I've been meaning to ask that 
for a while. Note the bug is not about if a project has orphans, missing
blockfiles, missing summary files or missing aliased audio files, but
about how Audacity presents that data to the user to protect them 
from needless errors.


> "Append Import" is a highly requested feature that I hope will one day
> be implemented and a side effect of such a feature is that it would
> ease the pain of manually stitching together orphaned data files.

Does it help in stitching together recovered .au files when they are in 
random order? I think the naming scheme could legitimately be
considered as part of the work on Bug 137. 





Gale