Bug 79249

Summary:	Common convention of naming backup/previous files
Product:	[I don't know] kde	Reporter:	Marcin Kasperski <Marcin.Kasperski>
Component:	general	Assignee:	András Manţia <amantia>
Status:	RESOLVED FIXED
Severity:	wishlist	CC:	faure, nate
Priority:	NOR
Version:	unspecified
Target Milestone:	---
Platform:	Compiled Sources
OS:	Linux
Latest Commit:		Version Fixed In:
Sentry Crash Report:

Description Marcin Kasperski 2004-04-07 19:02:23 UTC

Version:            (using KDE KDE 3.2.1)
Installed from:    Compiled From Sources

A lot of KDE tools employs some convention of creating and naming backup/previous files. For instance kate creates files ended with tilde (like myfile.c~) while KFileReplace adds .old suffix.

It would be nice if single convention for such a names would be defined, documented and used by KDE applications. And it seems to me that adding ~ is better than adding .old (if we choose between the two I found), as the normal user is unlikely to create name like mydoc.txt~ while he or she can invent name like mydoc.txt.old.

This bug is somehow related to the bug 79248

Comment 1 Marcin Kasperski 2004-04-15 15:31:26 UTC

Additional thought: in fact, whatever their name is, blahblah~ or blahblah.old pollute working directories and are rarely used. It could be good idea to allow for keeping them in some special directory (say /x/y/z/v.txt~ is kept in <backups-dir>/x/y/z/v.txt). 

What about handling backups in a way similar to KDE trash-can (together with some GUI to revert to the backup)?

Comment 2 David Faure 2008-06-26 18:26:55 UTC

This wish (the initial part of it) is fulfilled. We have KSaveFile::backupFile nowadays, and it uses "~" for simple backup files [configurable using a hidden config key, but at least it's KDE-standard now].
Bug KFileReplace so that they use the same :)

Comment #1 is a much bigger wish, too much for me to even think about right now :) KOffice has such an option though.

Comment 3 Nate Graham 2020-09-30 04:31:26 UTC

Let's call it fixed then. :)