Bug 461642

This is an issue you should really take up with upstream. I'm not prepared to patch in this feature in Fedora's version of revelation.  To do what you are requesting would probably require a significant restructuring of the revelation codebase to disable the editing features for concurrently running versions of revelation. This is not something which should be done at the distribution level. It needs to be discussed as part of upstream development.

And simply preventing two instances from opening the same file isn't going to cut it. The revelation panel applet is technically another instance of revelation. it opens the file just as the normal revelation application does using the same underlying python code, except that it does not expose the ability to edit or save data to a file.

All revelation actually does when it opens a file is read the information into a datastore in memory and the closes the file via the gnomevfs.read_entire_file function. It then sets up a gnomevfs based monitor of the original file looking for a change of state.  Pretty much how text editors work. Think of revelation as just a special purposed text-editor.. not unlike gedit really.  You pull in the entire file buffer into memory... you make some edits... you save the file buffer back.

If I were going to champion this feature myself, I would need to understand exactly how revelation and revelation-applet are expected to work concurrently while still being able to keep multiple instances of revelation from exposing edit functions. 

-jef

Gedit appears not to allow multiple instances by a given user - if I run "gedit &" from a terminal window twice, the second instances exits immediately.  I'm not really familiar with any revelation-specific features - I installed MyPasswordSafe, revelation, fpm2, and keepassx recently but only use MyPasswordSafe on a regular basis.  I reported this issue as bug #459940 against MyPasswordSafe but haven't gotten a reply yet as to whether it's a bug - it certainly seems like one, though.  My father, who is not good with GUIs, tends to get confused when there are multiple windows up and ends up running multiple instances of MyPasswordSafe simultaneously.  I haven't gotten around to reporting this against Fedora's keepassx and at this point don't know if I should.

This isnt a Fedora specific issue... this is a revelation design issue.  Is this a failure of revelation's underlying design or was this deliberately chosen by the upstream developers?  I'm not in a position to evaluate that. I've looked at the code I don't see an obvious fixme or other bug. Revelation works as designed.

If you want to work on a patch that adds this feature to revelation. I can certainly help make sure that patch finds its way into the hands of the upstream developers for evaluation. But I am wary of introducing a significant feature enhancement to revelation that is a Fedora specific enhancement.

A Fedora specific fix isn't appropriate in this situation.

Even without talking about the applet....just preventing revelation from starting..isn't good enough. Revelation can be pointed to different key files...so having multiple revelations running with different key files open may be a design goal. Since revelation doesn't have the concept of multiple buffers...where gedit does..a new instance of revelation must be started to have 2 key files open side by side. 

My best guess at how to handle this would be to have each version of revelation open and hold open the key file in a writable state, then overwrite the open file on save.  Subsequent revelation instances could then open the file in the read-only state preventing editing.  But this would require a major overhaul of the code which controls the UI so that the editing functions would be disabled (greyed out) when I file is opened read-only to prevent you from making any edits.   That's non-trivial and a significant change to the revelation design as it stands. Something which must be discussed with upstream.

If I were to be convinced this were worthwhile I probably could implement the changes given enough time, but I wouldn't put such an aggressive patch into Fedora's package until upstream adopted it.

-jef

I reported this upstream at

http://svn.codepoet.no/revelation/ticket/407

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