State persistence over reloads about hammerspoon

[cmsj]

Hi

This needs careful thought - if the new confit after the reload no longer wants the stuff being preserved, we'll need to gc it somehow.

Cheers,

Chris Jones

On 10 Oct 2014, at 14:02, Peter van Dijk [email protected] wrote:

caffeinate would like this, also probably some other modules.

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[Habbie]

Good point. Easy if we just allow strings and ints to persist, hard (impossible?) if we allow modules to persist any kind of object.

[Habbie]

Based on IRC discussion: how about one table that persists over reloads (but not restarts?), plus a flag to setup.lua (visible from init.lua) that tells the user whether this is a fresh start or not? Users/extensions would just save state to this table on any change (thus avoiding an 'on reload' hook).

[cmsj]

+1. I'd go for a table that persists over reloads, but not restarts. We have hs.settings for that, if people want to do that sort of thing.
I think ideally the flag would indicate "reload", "restart", "first" (the latter meaning that this is the first time HS has been launched since the computer was booted)

[cmsj]

Do we have any idea how we would persist a Lua table across a reload? Given that the table could contain almost anything!

[Habbie]

What's the problem with limiting it to basic types (float, string)?

[cmsj]

I don't think anyone is going to work on this issue - it can be worked around trivially by using hs.settings to store some ephemeral data and then clearing it as soon as it's been used.