Version:            (using KDE 4.3.2)
Installed from:    I Don't Know

Say you're moving a folder from one location to another; in the meantime, you attempt to edit a text file in that folder with Kate, and save it. As mentioned in the tutorials,

"if you are Moving, Copying or Deleting large directories then you need to use the icon to monitor the progress of your operation.
If you don't then any subsequent actions you do, may well use an incomplete file structure resulting in corrupted files."

This is not good. Don't get me wrong, every DE/OS does the same thing, but it's still not good. Since KDE knows which files/directories are currently being copied, moved, or deleted, is there a way to hook into routines that save files and warn the user if this is the case?
This is definitely not trivially accomplished, because I imagine most apps just save their files by doing an fopen/fwrite/fclose, but if this can be caught and handled via a warning to the user, the user experience in cases like this would be much improved.
An option is, of course, to take an exclusive lock on files and directories that are the source of an active move operation, but that comes with its own set of issues. It would be nice to work out some general guidelines as to what happens in different cases and which warnings should be presented to the user; for example,

-if the user saves a file to a directory that is currently being copied to, warn the user with 'This file is subject to an active copy operation that has not yet completed. Saving now may have unexpected results.'; possibly also pop open the notification for the copy operation the warning is talking about.

-if the user saves a file to a directory that is currently being deleted, warn with 'This file is part of an ongoing delete operation. Saving now will result in the saved data being deleted from the destination location.'; again, pop up the notification for the delete operation.

and many other possibilities, of course.

This is a very specific example for a very general philosophy: corrupting data should be avoided if at all possible, and if there's a good chance that the user will end up with a result different from what his save operation normally yields, he should at least be warned about it. I realize that this is potentially opening a big can of worms, but I think it's one worth looking into. The first time a user sees this notification, they're going to be thankful for it.



This feature request was originally submitted through KDE Brainstorm, and has been submitted to Bugzilla due to popular demand. Original idea: http://forum.kde.org/brainstorm.php?mode=idea&i=38939