[ardour-dev] "out of disk space" problems with beta19

[Jack O'Quin]

Paul Davis <paul at linuxaudiosystems.com> writes:

> >Obviously, I'm not doing it right.  I really don't understand the
> >structure of that session file well enough to edit it.  Is there any
> >HOWTO documentation somewhere?  It looks relatively straightforward,
> >but I must be misunderstanding something crucial.
> 
> do you understand XML? send me the file, and a reminder of the audio
> file that was messed up, and i'll edit it for you. there's no HOWTO
> because (1) the file format is still evolving (barely) (2) this is not
> something i would want people to think is a normal thing to do (3) i
> had (mistakenly, it seems) assumed that anyone brave enough to use a
> text editor on an XML file would find it pretty self-evident :)

I do understand XML, but not the subtle connections between fields.
It appears that ardour joins various types of records using unique ID
fields as "pointers".  Their interconnections are not "obvious to the
casual observer".

I appreciate your generous offer of help.  By backing out all my edits
and starting over, I did finally succeed in fixing it myself.  Ardour
still complains about some pan automation file, but at least the
session opens and plays.  Since I'm not actually using any pan
automation, I'm hoping this error message is harmless.

Please understand that editing the session file is not a matter of
"bravery", but desperation.  When ardour refuses to open a session,
from the end-user perspective everything has been lost.  The fact that
most of the bits are still on the disk somewhere is useless without a
way out of that dilemma.  Some users are going to panic if this
happens to them in the middle of a recording session.

> its possible that we may never remove the files until the session is
> reloaded (i.e. lazy deletion after the next successful session load). 

Maybe a good idea, but the semantics need to be clear to the user.

Right now, the message says something like "when you empty the
wastebasket, 493.224 megabytes will be released".  Then you do that,
and nothing happens.
-- 
  joq