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Bug#297768: xfig: "Save as" over an old .fig complains if that .fig happens to be empty

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Hi Helge!

On Mi, 02 Mär 2005, Helge Hafting wrote:

Seems, that I never fully understood your ticket before.
Shame on me, that I didn't respond earlier :-(
Today I read it again and tried out what you described.

> I tried to save over an existing file.fig
> That file.fig happened to be a zero-length file.
> Saving worked, but I was hampered because xfig popped up a message telling
> me that the file was an invalid .fig file.
> 
> Such a message is of course necessary when trying to open a file for use,
> but I wasn't doing that.  I believe xfig tried to open it for reading
> in order to provide a preview the way xfig usually does when selecting
> filenames.  

I think that xfig tries to help you on selecting the correct file to
overwrite.  For this it presents the preview of the file you are
overwriting (so you can decide whether it's it good idea to overwrite
the selected file).  If the file is empty or a FIG file (maybe someone
used the .fig suffix for a different type of file), it presents you a
popup telling you, that you selected a file that is not a FIG file.

From my point of view this is a good behavior.
Usually overwriting an existing file is not what you want especially
if this file seems to be a FIG file but isn't.  An additional alarm
popup sounds like a good idea to me here.

> It'd be much better if the preview simply fail silently, or the error
> message could be rendered in the window space set aside for preview
> when this happen.  There was no use for the message because _I_ wasn't
> trying to use the file contents at all - I wanted to overwrite it
> with something new.

Okay, you were knowing this, but is this the standard use case?  Do
you usually create an empty file to overwrite it?  For me an empty
file may be a hint that something went wrong before (maybe the disk is
full, so the file wasn't written before?), so I like the additional
hint, that something went wrong before.  If I don't need the popup,
it's easy to close it with one click.

> It was xfig itself who wanted a look at the file contents, not me.
> An error message in such a case is only annoying.  Popups are bad
> user interfaces at the best of times, but a chore when I not even
> have _use_ for the message.

I have use for this message :-)

Greetings
Roland

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Bug#297768: xfig: "Save as" over an old .fig complains if that .fig happens to be empty Roland Rosenfeld <roland@debian.org> - 2020-08-02 19:40 +0200

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