racket / racket/drracket

DrRacket quits after recovering files

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Dominant language
Racket
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Forks
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No merged PRs in 30d

Description

If you start DrRacket and it finds you had unsaved files that you can recover, after dealing with them (or not) and dismissing the recovery dialog, DrRacket quits rather than finishing start up.

My impression is that this happens pretty consistently (at least on Mac OS), but I haven't tested various scenarios thoroughly yet: this just happened to me, and I wanted to file a quick note here before it slips my mind again (as it has before). Specifically, this is what happened this time:

  1. I started DrRacket from the terminal via open program.rkt.
  2. DrRacket shows the recovery dialog, at which point I realize I hadn't opened DrRacket since my system crashed.
  3. I recover what I want and dismiss the dialog.
  4. DrRacket silently quits. (Not just "has no windows open": it is not running.)
  5. Eventually I notice that program.rkt hasn't shown up yet and remember this issue.
  6. I run open program.rkt again and things proceed normally.

Obviously this is not among the major problems in the world, but, aside from being mildly annoying for various reasons (at least to me), it doesn't seem to be how other programs with a similar recovery feature behave. The basic behavior I would expect is either, once the recovery dialog is dismissed, to continue opening the requested file (or a blank editor, as applicable), or to show the recovery dialog concurrently with the window created by normal startup.

A delightful additional feature would be adding to the recovery dialog the option to open the recovered file after saving it—or, better yet, as an alternative to saving it: I generally have no idea what #mredauto#7# was without looking at it, so I usually end up saving it just to open it and rename or delete it later—but that would clearly be an extension, rather than a matter of fixing surprising behavior.

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First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Reproduce the startup sequence on macOS using open program.rkt, then inspect the recovery-dialog and normal startup flow. Done means dismissing recovery leaves DrRacket running and continues opening program.rkt or an appropriate editor window, without requiring a second launch.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Domain
desktop
Issue type
Bug
Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
35/100

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