>> If you're writing to a file that another program critically needs >> /that's/ your problem. > > Configuration file, for example, is critically for almost every daemon. > Do you think that it is only my problem? No, it is very real scenario > which could happen to everyone who use vim.
He didn't mean it's your problem personally and that no other user would experience it. He meant it's your problem as the user, not the editor's problem. If you edit your config files, most likely you need to SIGHUP the daemon to reread it anyway. And if you don't, most likely the daemon is aware of the somewhat dumb practice of reading its config files at unpredictable intervals, and provides a device, such as crontab -e, to avoid problems, as has already been mentioned. Playing games moving temporary files around for the purpose of keeping daemons happy is not an editor's job, but the user's, or a utility such as crontab's. Having the editor write to a temporary file and move it into place has other worse effects as have already been mentioned (breaking of links, use of file descriptors by calling processes such as crontab -e, etc.). Indeed, other software sometimes expects the editor to overwrite the original file, which implies a time with an empty or partially written file. So although the current behaviour isn't really ideal, neither are the alternatives, and in fact, the alternatives are probably worse. It could be another option, I suppose, or incorporated into an existing one (it is only possible if writebackup and backup are unset or copybackup is yes, or there is a time of nonexistence of the file, which is just as bad), but is it worth the bother? How often are people actually bitten by this? Very rarely, I think, and the consequences are far from catastrophic when it happens. It couldn't be the default due to the other negative side effects of the method, too, so would have to be set when appropriate, which means you might as well use some other tool to do the job. Ben. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message from the "vim_dev" maillist. For more information, visit http://www.vim.org/maillist.php -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
