Riiiiiiiiiiiight...Mark Fowler wrote:Doesn't December come round quickly?http://www.perladvent.org/2002/
so you use IO::AtomicFile, and ... at risk of being picky ...
1. Its temporary filename doesn't incorporate anything random, or the process ID. So should you happen to have two processes running simultaneously (eg. wraparound cron syndrome), you could end up end with interleaved interleaved content and not be very content content. Innit.
2. It's not fail-safe. If you don't explicitly do the "disaster recovery" bit by using an eval block and the ->delete method (and calling a fatal exception a disaster seems melodramatic), the default behaviour is for IO::AtomicFile to quietly and silently put your incomplete file into the place of the live one.
Admittedly this makes life easier for people who want to drop IO::AtomicFile in in place of IO::File, or Nick Hornby fans who don't want to write "->commit", but that strikes me as the Wrong design decision.
IMO, if you write a Perl module that does something nice and useful transparently, it should bloody well do it properly, ie. not with obscure edge cases that the user can't see and that you don't talk about, and encouraging the user to do the right thing. Part of the point of code reuse is that reused code can (and must) be built solidly.
Cheers
Tim
