che-theia should have autosave activated by default

[sunix]

che-theia should have autosave activated by default

[slemeur]

Would you enabled it for all files and all stacks?

[benoitf]

@slemeur : you don't want to use a global flag ?

[slemeur]

Ideally, As a user I'd like to be able to configure the autosave behavior in my user preferences. But then, I'd like to be able to tune that on a per workspace basis too.

Do we have a mechanism to do that? (If not, I'll create an epic)

[benoitf]

I think the idea is to have autosave enabled by default but as any preference, you can customise in your IDE preferences the behaviour (the same behaviour we had before theia changed default)

[mmorhun]

Now we have synchronization mechanism as was requested before: if user changes a Theia preference in a workspace it will update defaults and the changes will be applied to other workspaces on their restart.

[slemeur]

there are certain preferences which would be nice to apply to all workspaces and there are certain other preferences which should stay specific to a single workspace.

Are you saying that, today, all preferences are spread across all user's workspaces?

[mmorhun]

All Theia preferences from user scope are shared between all workspaces (actually it is json file).
If user wants to override something it could be easily done via Theia workspace preferences (which has higher priority and can override value from user preferences).

[sunix]

could we just have it by default ?
what is the point not having this by default ?

[evidolob]

@slemeur Can you provide your vision on this issue? Should we work on it?

[slemeur]

eclipse-theia/theia#4776 (comment)

[sunix]

@slemeur @tsmaeder @nickboldt @l0rd @rhopp for GA ?

[l0rd]

@evidolob both @slemeur and myself think that we should have autosave activated by default on che-theia. Now there a couple of things that need to be analyzed to understand what is the milestion of this issue:

• How much work it requires to switch back che-theia to autosave?
• Is there a risk of unexpected side-effects? In other workds: upstream theia choice to disable autosave was related to a better/safer behavior or only for VSCode/Theia parity ?

[evidolob]

How much work it requires to switch back che-theia to autosave?

It a matter of changing default settings(false-> true), but, AFAIK, Theia doesn't have API to override the default values.
cc @akurinnoy

Is there a risk of unexpected side-effects?

No

In other words: upstream theia choice to disable autosave was related to a better/safer behavior or only for VSCode/Theia parity ?

Yes, it's pretty clear that the only reason is VSCode compatibility:
eclipse-theia/theia#4776

[benoitf]

override is in package.json
eclipse-theia/theia@9eb7f4e see chagelog

[evidolob]

Then, OK.
@l0rd If you want to have this done for GA, please add proper labels.

[tsmaeder]

Is there a real reason to enable autosave by default except "it's what Che 6 did"? It seems a pretty rare default as far as IDE's go. Personally, I don't like the behaviour.

[sunix]

Is there a real reason to enable autosave by default except "it's what Che 6 did"? It seems a pretty rare default as far as IDE's go. Personally, I don't like the behaviour.

Most of the developers are expecting auto save and like the behaviour. We can make any survey any time, it will have the same result: https://twitter.com/sunsengdavidtan/status/1131142032582356993

Also this is a behaviour that we have in most web app: gdoc, gmail, etc ...

[tsmaeder]

But we're not writing an Web App, we're writing an IDE and IDE's don't typically have this behaviour. Also: not to cast aspersions on your twitter followers, but I hardly think that's a representative sample.

[sunix]

But we're not writing an Web App, we're writing an IDE and IDE's don't typically have this behaviour. Also: not to cast aspersions on your twitter followers, but I hardly think that's a representative sample.

...
Google was writting a word processor and word processors typically didn't have this behaviour.
Google was writting a email client and email clients typically didn't have this behaviour

Not representative ? at least it is more representative than your own opinion.

Let's close this debate as it's been decided by our decision makers to do it. By the way this would be the default option it doesn't mean you could not disabling it.

[l0rd]

No discussion has ever happened to disable autosave on Che. It has been disabled a couple of months ago without any notice or approval. That's something that we need to fix.

If a proper discussion happens in the future I am +1 to disable autosave but for the time being let's be consistent with previous version of Che.

[slemeur]

We are doing cloud tools since quite a lot of time and we learnt from users that there is one thing they hate: loosing their datas. That is a big concern regarding how users will fell confident to use our tool.

As such, it's reasonable to turn on auto-save by default to avoid loosing source code changes. If the user doesn't like this behavior, he'll go into his preferences and explicitly change the preference and agreed with/understand the risks.

[sunix]

eclipse-che/che-theia#342 is not merged yet

[akurinnoy]

eclipse-che/che-theia#342 is merged