On Feb 24, 2012, at 0:33, Thomas Schneider wrote: > Christiaan: > >> If that's what Dropbox does, than there's no way to fix that. When >> the file is deleted there's nothing to follow. We cannot know what >> will happen to a file location in the future, if anything, and we >> can predict even less what the document itself will do, as that's a >> black box. Therefore Skim is conservative, and will not update when >> there can be any doubt, starting from the principle that doing >> things wrongly is worse than not doing things (especially something >> that is non-standard and goes against the system behavior, such as >> this.) The only way to safely follow and update files is if Apple >> would support it, because they are the only ones that know what >> happens in the internals. But they don't. > > Thanks for the quick and precise answer. > > I learned a little more. > > I put a fresh PDF into dropbox on my computer. The name of the file > was Karplus2011.pdf. I launched Skim on the file. I then modified it > on my iPad using goodreader and sync'd back. Skim showed no change. > However, when I clicked on Skim, the name of the file on the top of > the window changed to: > > /Users/toms/Dropbox/.dropbox.cache/2012-02-23/Karplus2011\ \(deleted\ > 4f46c83f-42dfe-9b2c4738\).pdf > > So apparently the file is not deleted, it is MOVED to the backup cache > that dropbox holds for previous versions of files. Skim apparently > follows the file into the cache and so no further changes appear. > > I can see two solutions (aside from the copy/atchange trick). One > would be to prevent the backup mechanism from functioning. It's not > obvious how to do this from the online dropbox documentation.
My guess is that this won't be possible. > The > other would be for Skim to keep pointing to the same file location > instead of moving with the file. Is that easy? > > Tom No, it's (nearly) impossible. As I indicated, it's Apple that implements much of the generics of the document mechanism, and for us that's just a black box. And the worst we could do is to follow one "file" for updating while the system follows a different one. When that may happen, we just give up, as I explained. Apart from that, when a file is moved, who says it's moved for backup or deletion and will be replaced in the future, or wether it's moved because that's what the user wants? Certainly a dumb program can't tell the difference. Christiaan ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Virtualization & Cloud Management Using Capacity Planning Cloud computing makes use of virtualization - but cloud computing also focuses on allowing computing to be delivered as a service. http://www.accelacomm.com/jaw/sfnl/114/51521223/ _______________________________________________ Skim-app-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/skim-app-users
