[vlc-devel] Save, auto-save, no save...

[Rémi Denis-Courmont]

	Hello,

A number of users seem annoyed that VLC does not automatically save some 
settings, in particular filters. Currently, there are three ways to save the 
configuration:
- If an item is marked for auto-save, it will be saved if VLC exits cleanly.
- If the user presses save, all items are saved.
- There is a function to save the items of a specific plugin.

I don't like per-plugin save. It requires the caller to hardcode the plugin 
names, and suffers from obvious granularity issues. It is only for podcast at 
the moment, and misused by hotkeys (in a failed attempt to save bookmarks).

I also dislike the per-item auto-save functionality, which defeats the purpose 
of the explicit save button. In general, what gets saved is really not 
intuitive. The save button saves not only settings that were modified in the 
current instance of the preferences dialog.

One obvious solution is to just always autosave everything. This would 
slightly increase the probably that the user screws up the configuration beyond 
repair. But otherwise, it would simplify the code heavily, and I think the 
behaviour would be far more intuitive. Furthermore, it would then be easier 
and cleaner for the UI to automatically remember filtering parameters.

But there may be better ideas, that I have not crossed my mind.

-- 
Rémi Denis-Courmont
http://www.remlab.info