Bug 79249

Summary: Common convention of naming backup/previous files
Product: [I don't know] kde Reporter: Marcin Kasperski <Marcin.Kasperski>
Component: generalAssignee: 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:

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. :)