PC shutdown without closing Lazarus
lazarus / 21-General

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bobby100 · 2023-03-26 17:38

Today, I've left my laptop on, with Lazarus running. When the battery
got empty, the Windows 10 did a shutdown, just as expected.

After starting the laptop again, the Lazarus installation was messed
up to the point that I could not start Lazarus anymore. I got the
dialog where it says something about the configuration, and at
clicking on Next it just got stuck (tried á couple of times).
Installing Lazarus over the existing installation didn't help.

Next step, rename the directory
c:\Users\{user_name}\AppData\Local\lazarus\ got me to the clean
Lazarus without my settings and installed components.
Inspecting the old files (before re-installing Lazarus) from that
directory - the file environmentoptions.xml was 64kb in size, but full
of zeros. Other files in the directory seems to be OK.

I wish that Lazarus could be more resistant to such forced shutdowns.

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jamie · 2023-03-26 18:46

I suppose Laz should at least do an auto save at that point, at least
if you are working on a ready started project, not something you
haven't even saved with a new name yet.

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Martin_fr · 2023-03-26 19:46

A file full of #0 would imho imply that the IDE tried to write the
file, but never got to finish it.

The file is afaik normally read on start, but not held open. So if
Lazarus had just been killed, without writing the file, then the file
should be fine.
It must have tried to write it (be that because of the shutdown or
other).

Since it can happen that writing a file fails, maybe it should rename
the old file first to a backup. Then something to restore would
exist....