::scr saving

[Simon Kinahan]

> At first I argued, probably out of reactionaryism, but now I'm not so
> sure ...

Well, it depends on the alternative. The obvious thing to do these days
would be to update the file as it is edited, as some kind of background
activity, but I think that takes aways too much control. I very often load
one file, and want to save it as something else. I also often load a file,
edit it a bit, and then decide what I've done is wrong and want to go back
to the original.

What you want is something like transactional semantics: "commit changes",
"roll back changes", or "create new copy". But as long as you have autosave,
this turns out to be the same as "save", "revert" and "save as", so since
everyone understands that terminology, why not stick with it ?

What would be useful is a filesystem which tracked the change history of
documents itself. Like version control, only finer grained, and invisible to
the user. Something like what persistent object stores do. Then "undo" and
"revert" would be the same operation on different scales.

Simon