bug#889: "Recover Crashed Session" fails "No files can be recovered"

bug#889: "Recover Crashed Session" fails "No files can be recovered"

[era+emacsbugs]

> No files can be recovered from this session now
<...>
> The files exist, the temp files do not exist- in this case, I had
> saved all my work.

I think this is basically a misunderstanding of what "recover-session"
does.

Emacs saves some state while you are editing.  These are stored in the
temporary files you see in the .saves-* file.  If you have unsaved
changes, recover-session can help you reclaim the unsaved data from the
temporary files into the proper files.

It does not "recover" your "session" back to the way it was before the
crash.  (The package "desktop" does something like this, but you have to
invoke "desktop-save" explicitly in order to start it.)

The Info documentation for Emacs explains this fairly well.
http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Recover.html

Granted, I think it would be a lot more useful if recover-session could
work in the way the reporter expected.

In the meantime, perhaps the docstring for recover-session should be
clarified.

I have a private bit of elisp I call "recover-buffers" but it's not on
the machine where I'm writing this.  Remind me to follow up here with a
pointer to a public repository in a few weeks.  Thanks.

/* era */

-- 
If this were a real .signature, it would suck less.  Well, maybe not.

bug#889: "Recover Crashed Session" fails "No files can be recovered"

[era+emacsbugs]

On Mon, 12 Jan 2009 09:49:21 -0800, "Yary Hluchan" said:
> Here's your reminder!

Thanks.

I set up a public Darcs repo at
http://porkmail.org/elisp/recover-buffers

Darcs isn't invasive; you don't actually need Darcs to download it.  In
fact you can just browse the code by visiting that URL.

This piggybacks on recover-session, and then just redefines the C-c C-c
keybinding to run recover-buffers-finish instead of
recover-session-finish.  It does call recover-session-finish from inside
recover-buffers-finish, but then proceeds to visit all files from the
auto-save file.

The recover-buffers-skip-list feature probably isn't very useful; my
vague recollection is that my previous version had this feature because
recovering remote Tramp files used to be something I didn't want to
attempt, but these days Tramp is well-supported and I haven't come up
with any other scenario where I would actually still want this.  So
perhaps it should just be obsoleted.

Hope this is useful for y'all,

/* era */

-- 
If this were a real .signature, it would suck less.  Well, maybe not.