P: Reset your Preferences: Moving from the magic spell to a more serious approach

After spending more time recently investigating how LR writes the preferences file, I've posted an easily implemented proposal that could significantly reduce the frequency of preference-file corruption:

https://community.adobe.com/t5/lightroom-classic-ideas/avoid-preferences-quot-corruption-quot-by-changing-when-the-preferences-file-gets-written/idi-p/12981414

A few of us have observed that in the last month or two it seemed like there were a lot more recommendations to "reset preferences". Out of nerdly curiosity, I used a script to count all posts with that phrase by day, and indeed, there have have been many more such posts per day on average in the past months.

The chart below shows the average number of posts per day for the time period when each version was the newest:

For example, LR 11.0 was the newest version from 10/26/21 through 12/13/21, and in that period, there was an average of 2.7 posts per day containing "reset preferences".  Note that not all of those posts were referencing version 11.0, though most of them were.

LR 11.0, 11.3, and LR 11.3.1 were responsible for nearly twice as many reset-preference posts per day than the versions of LR 10.   Did something change in LR 11, e.g. with task scheduling, so that the race condition in the preferences implementation (described above) occurs more frequently?  Is it that LR just has more bugs, which initially don't have known causes or workarounds, so forum members suggest "reset preferences" more frequently? Or maybe there was a surge in total users of LR 11, so proportionately more users come to the forums.

Alright... thanks for the feedback. So we just sit and wait for another 2 years... 😉

I don't think there's anything a user can do to fix the corrupted-preferences problem. Adobe posted here that they were looking at this issue two years ago, but I haven't seen any updates since then.

@John_R_Ellis I just stumbled upon this post and checked out your plugin. Surprise, surprise... the two values differ. I've also read your comments in testprefswriting.lua. But now I'm not sure if i can do something to fix this problem. Is there any chance to fix it?

Hi John,

The more I think about this, the more I'm convinced that the root of all evil in LR is LUA. I have always considered the use of LUA as a very strange idea and an unsuitable choice (understatement). The lack of serious synchronization tools and of exception handling capabilities are certainly the origin of many bugs and that's what makes spotting them almost impossible. Otherwise, how could Adobe explain why so many issues (including the one discussed here) are still not fixed after all these years ? Not to even mention the performance issues. It's hard to imagine a project manager in charge of the development of a very resource demanding application and saying "OK, let's write a good part of this application using a scripting language having limited capabilities". This is beyond me.

So, I'm no longer expecting any progress in this area until LR has been re-written using a more solid language or replaced with another product. But this decision should have been taken much earlier. As time goes by, this is less likely to happen.

See my post above, which suggests that fixing preferences is a non-trivial undertaking. (Adobe should do it, and should have done it years ago.)

I was thinking of writing a post along similar to his one - but you had it right in 2018.  Nothing has changed in 2020 - almost as if Adobe wants to punish users for changing Preferences, or at least blame the victims when things go wrong.  It must be possible to give users a button that does whatever resetting Preferences does without losing choices.