[Bug 61340] Re: Alacarte emptied my Applications menu list.

[Pete Ryland]

Perhaps this is an issue with disk space?  Can the original poster
confirm if there was limited available disk space when running alacarte?

The information I can glean from the stack trace is that the menu file
(normally at ~/.config/menus/applications.menu) existed but was empty
(already).

Alacarte doesn't seem to make any checks when saving the file (and the
save method is called after every operation), and doesn't make a backup
of the original, so I'm guessing this report relates to a situation
where alacarte opened for writing the file on a full filesystem, then
the write failed, leaving the file at 0-bytes, which caused an unhandled
exception.

The MenuEditor.save() code should really do the following:

try:
  write the file to a temporary file in the same directory (using mkstmp for safety of course)
  mv the file to the right filename
except:
  alert the user
finally:
  remove the tmp file (if it wasn't moved)

But this approach doesn't fit in well with the design of alacarte and
would be quite a laborious fix for such an unlikely bug, so I'm not
going to fix it while there are other more important bugs to fix.

** Changed in: alacarte (Ubuntu)
       Status: Unconfirmed => Confirmed

-- 
Alacarte emptied my Applications menu list.
https://launchpad.net/bugs/61340