On Friday 13 May 2005 06:56 pm, Chris Cannam wrote:

> > about the obnoxious audio file management issues that have been
> > pissing me off for awhile now.

> But what?  Your last email mentioned a number of problems, but I don't
> recall that you were proposing any particular solution.

"Toward the second end, we really need some 
kind of morning after built in.  I would see this as something in the file 
manager to delete all unused files.  Implementing the option itself is not 
such a difficult proposition, but it could be a *dangerous* feature if the 
user has not had discipline enough to keep this project's files isolated."

That's what I have under way.  Edit -> Unload and Delete Unused Files or 
something to that effect.  It's not a bad solution.  The file manager knows 
which files in ~/foo are associated with this particular project, so it won't 
delete files from some other project unless the user has done something 
external to Rosegarden to cause the names to be recycled somehow.  It needs  
big warnings, and I have it separate from the "Unload Unused Files" option to 
keep it conceptually separate in users' minds.

"I feel that if we are to have a morning after function, we should make 
compartmentalization mandatory, rather than an emphatic suggestion. "

I still agree with my original position, but I can't figure out how to make it 
work, for the reasons surmised in the original message.  Renaming things is a 
real problem.  It also causes problems for Plan B, which was to build the 
composition name into the RG-AUDIO name in similar fashion to the autosave 
files.

So, for various reasons, I think everything beyond this built-in morning after 
pill is going to have to be done externally.

I've got a retrofit morning after pill in the book, in the form of 
instructions for using a script that analyzes an .rg file, examines the audio 
path, and determines which RG-AUDIO* files are not needed any longer.  (On 
the presumption that if it has any other kind of name, it's not junk 
automatically.)  This does NOT work unless the user has unloaded unused files 
before saving the .rg, and it does NOT work if the user has files from more 
than one project in the same place.  I have suitable disclaimers, and the 
default action is to do nothing.  It's a crap solution, but it works.

The built-in version is better, because it is only aware of files that are 
associated with the particular document that's loaded, so it's automatically 
looking at a useful subset of whatever $AUDIO_PATH/ contains.  (It's 
currently working except I haven't worked out how to actually delete the 
files off the disk yet.)  Much less likely to cause collateral damage than my 
retrofit script, although it's still not impossible.  Much less likely to 
cause problems overall if people get used to using it as part of the last 
stage of polishing off a composition.

When I get a chance, I want to expand this script into a $HOME-wide cleanup to 
find ~ -name \*.rg and find ~ -name RG-AUDIO\*.wav and do appropriate things 
comparing the two.  This is what I really need to fix my own mess regardless.  
If it isn't in use by a segment in any .rg file in my ~ then it's probably 
cruft.

That's my thinking so far.  I haven't really had a hard think on it quite yet, 
to see if I have any even better ideas.  I felt the morning after script I'm 
putting with my book (putting on the SF web, with the URL in the book, 
tutorial/rg-clean-audio if you're bored, although I'm not necessarily signing 
off on this one as the final draft) was an essential thing to give to 1.0 
users.  There just isn't any reasonable way in 1.0 to clean up the mess, even 
if you have been polite enough to isolate your project's stuff to its own 
unique place.

It's just a crappy bash script with pile of grep|cut|cut|cut stuff in it 
though, and it's very delicate.

> the branch until you're about to commit to it -- it branches off the
> last revision you updated from, so there's no problem if the repository
> has changed in the mean time).

Great, I'll do that once I get to the other side of the book thing and have 
time to play with it.  I really hope to come up with something acceptable, 
even though I have my own doubts about winding up anywhere good.  I like 
everything about the main window UI except for the fact that it's just too 
damn big.

-- 
Michael McIntyre  ----   Silvan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Linux fanatic, and certified Geek;  registered Linux user #243621
http://www.geocities.com/Paris/Rue/5407/
http://rosegarden.sourceforge.net/tutorial/


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