Hi All,
A lot of really good work on the design has already been done in T61209,
and there is a very in-depth proposal on this subject with some
interesting ideas and mockups for data managers, and allowing unlinked
data to be edited, in this thread by LudvikKoutny on devtalk[1]
(although there are a number of things in the proposal I don't agree with).
Disclaimer: Most of what I say in this email comes from the discussions
and mockups by the community and aren't my ideas, I'm just outlining
them here to facilitate discussion :)
You can see mockups of the "warning on quit" idea here[2][3] and there
is actually already a precedent for doing this with unsaved images, so
from what I understand, it would basically be an improvement to that
system. The quit dialog would have
1. a warning icon and title that "Unused data will be lost.",
2. a line (or two) that gives a short overview of what would be
discarded e.g. (13 textures, 17 materials, 12 node groups, 5 unsaved
renders, etc.),
3. (optional/undecided) a link to more information on why this data is
unsaved[4],
4. a button to manage data that would either bring up a data management
window (such as in D14030), the asset browser in data management mode
(see T61209 and the devtalk thread[1]), or (as Jacob Merrill said) show
you to the outliner in it's Orphan Data mode, so that you can review and
save any needed data,
5. a button to cancel quitting, and
6. a button to quit anyway and discard the data.
Harley, you bring up an interesting point about how this would work when
the file is also unsaved. I don't think this has been discussed yet,
but currently I would expect that if the blend file is unsaved that a
dialog would pop up mentioning this, without mention of the unused data,
and allow you to cancel, quit anyway, or save the blend file. If you
cancel, everything's good; if you quit anyway, everything's good because
you don't care about unsaved data; if you save, Blender will save the
file and not quit, then, when you try to quit again, Blender will pop up
the dialog about unused data. If Blender changes to a Save & Quit
operator then I would suggest that it just pop up the second prompt
about unused data after pressing Save & Quit.
The one potential problem I can see with the above is if you have just
saved recently, but then altered something temporal, like the selection,
then in that case the warning wouldn't come up and you could potentially
lose data. To account for that case, it might be better to combine the
dialogs into one with a title like "Warning: Your blend file is unsaved
and also contains unused data that will be purged on quit", the short
overview of unsaved data, the Manage Data button (centered), and then on
the bottom row, the three normal quit dialog buttons (Don't Save (or
Discard All?), Cancel, and Save). Or perhaps there would be a good way
to integrate a checkbox for reviewing data, that if checked would bring
up the data manager on both save and don't save? However, as Julien
Eisel said, this part of the discussion should probably be moved to T61209.
Zack, I'm glad you're getting a better understanding of the issues, and
I agree it is a fascinating and complex problem. Your suggestion is
interesting, however I don't think it's technically possible to display
orphaned data in a collection. Maybe instead it would work to add an
additional outliner to the default layout in Orphan Data mode? I still
think warning on quit is the way to go, but more awareness of unused
data throughout a creative session is potentially a good idea.
Dan, That's an interesting suggestion about warning users ahead of time,
but it isn't the fake users that will get discarded, it's those that
aren't marked with fake user (and don't have any real users). What you
say would probably work for the first time you unlink a data-block though :)
I too agree that some simple indications would be much better than
rewriting the garbage collection system and I think that even just
warning the users and providing a link to documentation would be a huge
help; I don't think you would even need to include a Manage Data button
in the first iteration to see a large increase in usability.
Julien, You bring up some good points, and I want to think about them
more before writing an in-depth reply, but I want to say that I think
the dialog prompt is more to educate/remind people of the garbage
collection system, rather than to make it habit-proof. Also, I'm pretty
sure that Blender's reference counting is an implementation of garbage
collection[5], although not the most common :)
Ryan Inch (Imaginer)
[1]
https://devtalk.blender.org/t/proposal-explicit-management-of-data-blocks-and-possible-deprecation-of-fake-user/22852
[2] https://developer.blender.org/T61209#1303789
[3] https://developer.blender.org/T61209#1303846
[4]
https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/files/data_blocks.html#life-time
[5]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garbage_collection_(computer_science)#Reference_counting
Again, no quotes because of gmail :(
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