On Jan 31, 2010, at 08:10 PM, Silke von Bargen wrote:

Martin v. Löwis schrieb:

...

There is also the issue of race conditions with multiple simultaneous accesses. The original format for the PEP had race conditions for multiple simultaneous writers; ZIP will also have race conditions for concurrent readers/writers (as any new writer will have to overwrite the central directory, making the zip file temporarily unavailable - unless they copy it, in which case we are back to writer/writer races).

Regards, Martin

Good point. OTOH the probability for this to happen actually is very small.

And yet, when it does happen, it's probably a monster to debug and defend against. Unless we have a convincing cross-platform story for preventing these race conditions, I think a single-file (e.g. zipfile) approach is infeasible. -Barry