Hi John & friends.

On Thur., Feb. 03, 2000 @ 5:09 PM, John Maloney [John.Maloney at disney.com]
wrote:
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[Regarding making .change files on Mac a non-TEXT file]

"Since it is seldom useful to directly edit these files with a text editor
(indeed, they are big enough to be unopenable by many text editors), we lose
nothing by changing their file type and we might prevent a few inadvertent
file-transfer mistakes."
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[Normally, I would rather bite my tongue than disagree with anyone from SqC,
but on this subject, I do have a minor remark]

Let me start out by saying that I am not a Mac user, so my point may be
moot, however...  I have had to open up and use parts of the .change file on
several occasions.  This requirement usually results from my having done
something stupid that causes Squeak to suffer a hard crash.  Whenever this
happens, you loose all of your unsaved work.  In my case, I ran into this
problem repeatedly because of some tricky infinite recursion bugs in my code
(blowing the stack invariably causes Squeak to suffer a hard crash on Win
NT).  In any case, the only tool I have found that can be used to open the
.change file in a timely fashion has been Microsoft Word.

Well, I, for one, would prefer to still be able to open this file and
extract useful things from it.  Since Squeak has a very difficult time with
large files, my only option, barring adding better long file support to
Squeak, is to use a 3rd party text editor like MS Word.  So, to make a long
story short, I would prefer to keep the .changes file readable.  Changing
its file type in the way you folks have suggested may not make the file
unreadable, however.  In this area, I am a neophyte.  If I am mistaken,
please ignore this silly note!

BTW:  there is a handy feature in VSE called the "recover.log" that would
obviate my need to open the .change file.  It is a file that is formatted
like a .change file that contains a summary of all things that you've done
that haven't been formally saved.  Saving your image, of course, truncates
this file.  The beauty of the recover.log file is that it always holds the
unsaved stuff and only the unsaved stuff.  Perhaps now is a good time to add
something like this to Squeak.

Cheers!

---==> Chris