Re: Question about handling file deletion

[Stephen Berman <stephen.berman@gmx.net>]

On Sat, 29 Jun 2013 16:37:25 +0300 Timur Aydin <ta@taydin.org> wrote:

> On 6/26/2013 3:22 PM, Stephen Berman wrote:
>> If a package provides functionality for deleting files used by it, is it
>> considered a bug in the package if it does not handle the situation
>> where a user deletes such files using a command outside of the package
>> and this causes errors when using the package which don't arise if the
>> package file-deletion functionality is used?  I'm faced with this issue
>> in the new version of todo-mode.el (see bug#14688).  If someone deletes
>> a todo file using e.g. Dired and then gets an error in Todo mode and
>> reports it as a bug, is it kosher for me reply "If it hurts, don't do
>> that.  Use todo-delete-file." and close the bug?  (That command doesn't
>> actually exist yet, but I think it will be much easier to implement than
>> trying to handle the result of deleting todo files outside of Todo
>> mode.)
>
> When I visit a file and then delete that file using "rm", the buffer of that
> file is still there and emacs doesn't do anything about it. So if somebody
> deletes a TODO file, why not let the todo information stay in the respective
> buffer? 

It does, and this can cause problems, as I elaborated in this thread.

>         So what is different about todo-mode.el that makes it necessary to
> implement a different behavior?
>
> I'm not criticizing you motivation, only trying to understand the situation
> better.

I tried to explain that here:

http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2013-06/msg01154.html

But in this followup:

http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2013-06/msg01216.html

I acknowledged that it's better to handle external file deletion, and
that's what I'll try to do.

Steve Berman