help needed - thanks & clarification

Chris Reuter cgreuter at calum.csclub.uwaterloo.ca
Mon May 1 12:54:29 UTC 2000


[Sorry if this has already been discussed.  I haven't been keeping up
with the list these last few weeks but this message and a few others
got past my mail filter.]

On Sun, Apr 30, 2000 at 12:36:06PM -0700, Dan Ingalls wrote:
[...]
> >[I should have mentionned from the outset that none of the precious
> >data is in the change file, since none of it involves code. It's
> >all notes and texts (much like if you had data in workspaces or
> >bookmorphs).]
> >
> >thanks again and wish me luck!

If you have access to a Unix-like system or a set of Unix-style file
utilities (e.g. Cygwin), you might try running the "strings" command
on the corrupted image.  I just tried it now on a 2.7 image and
managed to find the contents of the welcome window completely intact.

> Michal -
> 
> Given that you are looking for notes other than in code, they will
> almost all be instances of Text, of which there are relatively few,
> otherwise, in the image.  This will be a much better basis for the
> enumeration than all instances of String.  Let us know if you get
> exasperated.
> 
> It is unfortunate that this happened.  Of course there are many ways
> that it could have been prevented, but the absoluteness of the
> failure is out of the ordinary.  I do not think it would be all that
> hard to allow Squeak to fail from the save primitive, and keep
> running.  

At that, I'm surprised that Squeak doesn't do the common thing of
first renaming the old image file to something like <name>.image.bak
before saving.  This is pretty much standard behaviour for most
programs.  (I was thinking of adding this myself but I haven't had a
significantly tragic image loss yet to motivate me. :)


			   --Chris





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