The distinction between persistent and ephemeral state may be too coarse-grained. In many applications like preference systems and object persistence more fine-

The distinction between persistent and ephemeral state may be too coarse-grained. In many applications like preference systems and object persistence more fine-grained distinctions are needed. As a typical example, miscellaneous data like window positions, sizes, and settings can and should be reset under certain conditions in desktop applications, but they still need to be persistent. There is a need for systems of default values & conditions that regulate when resets from corrupted states are allowed and when resets are executed for certain types of data (but not for others). I've never seen a framework or OS-support such fine-grained persistence and failure management. It's strange because almost every application needs something like this, and if it's just to reset a faulty preferences file. I've always thought that these kind of features should be provided by the OS, together with indexing and better guarantees for file integrity (e.g. ACID-compliant atomic file operations).