[249] in Athena Bugs
emacs,mail
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (tasteele@ATHENA.MIT.EDU)
Mon Apr 25 11:26:52 1988
From: <tasteele@ATHENA.MIT.EDU>
To: bugs@ATHENA.MIT.EDU
Date: Mon, 25 Apr 88 11:24:41 EDT
I have finally gotten around to writing up some annoying features
when quota's are exceeded.
When using emacs and your working quota is full and you save a file
emacs allows you to exit unsuspecting saving nothing in the file and
moving the previous version to *~. This has cost me an extra 4 hours
on last minutes edits with the course evaluation guide and almost wasted
several days of effort on a 6.170 project. Even if emacs cannot save the
current file without making a *~ file it would be better, or at least a
warning saying that the disk was full and asking for a fully typed
response like "Do you wish current edits to be destroyed yes/no"
A similar problem exists with mail. when incorperating mail that would
exceed ones quota the mail beyond quota is written as 0 block files.
Once the inc function is done there is no way to recover lost mail.
Rumor has it that if you notice this before inc is done and hit ctl c
inc is aborted and nothing is deleted from po box. This however doesn't make
life any easier for people who get lots of mail that they do not keep.
A partial inc would solve this problem where only part of ones mail need
be inced at one time.
I understand that quota expansion from these programs would probably not
be feasible even though this might be the most user desirable, error
notification is minimal while error recovery should be implemented.
thank you,
tim steele
