File Corruption

[Richard Gaskin]

Howard Bornstein wrote:

>> File corruption means something wasn't written to disk properly.
> 
> I want to suggest that there are other ways a Rev project can get
> corrupted. I believe the IDE itself may at times jumble things. The
> problem is not that they get scrambled *while* being written to disk.
> They can get scrambled during normal operations of the IDE. Then, when
> the project is saved, the scrambled data is saved along with it.
> 
> I've had this happen to me quite a few times since Rev 1.0. For example,
> I had a button that simple went to another card. The button code was
> simple, and the open card code was simple. Nothing esoteric or strange,
> and I didn't change it between the time it worked and the time it didn't.
> Suddenly, every time I went to that card, I'd get a hard crash. Had to
> reboot my system (Mac OS 9). If I built a standalone, it would crash upon
> going to the card, in both Mac and Windows.
> 
> So what happened here? Was it the code? I don't think so. My solution was
> to clone the card that was crashing, delete the original, and all was
> well. Same code, no crash.
> 
> I'm guessing (please provide another explaination, because I'd really
> like to understand this) that Rev got something screwed up internally in
> reference to this card. However, when the card was cloned, it sort of
> started over and put things back in order.
> 
> I consider a case like this "corruption". It just didn't happen during a
> disk write.

If we start using words for different purposes they lose their meaning, and
hence their usefulness.

What's on that card?

While some problems may appear to be random, computers offer us something
the natural world lacks:  everything in a computer is ultimately a
deterministic system; if we can recreate the circumstances we can recreate
the result.

The trick is to identify differences between the working state and the
non-working state.

Have you found a repeatable recipe for creating the crash?  Once you have
that, we can examine the objects, systems, and sequence of steps to hone in
on the source of the problem.

Sometimes diagnostics take some work, but I've never encountered a bug yet
that could not ultimately be diagnosed.

-- 
 Richard Gaskin 
 Fourth World Media Corporation
 Developer of WebMerge 2.2: Publish any database on any site
 ___________________________________________________________
 Ambassador at FourthWorld.com       http://www.FourthWorld.com
 Tel: 323-225-3717                       AIM: FourthWorldInc