[Mailman-Developers] Re: tempfile bug or doc bug

[Scott]

just read the tempfile.py source and saw the reason behind this: 

tempfile.mktemp says 

	while ...
	    if not os.path.exists(filename):
	    	return filename

the app says 

fname = tempfile.mktemp()
fp = open(fname, "a+")

which doesn't exactly test whether the path exists and simultaneously
create a file ;)

perhaps a better warning should be added to mktemp docs?

scott


On Tue, Oct 13, 1998 at 08:27:28PM -0400, Scott wrote:
| 
| the docs to tempfile state that:
| 
| Warning: if a Unix process uses mktemp(), then calls fork() and both
| parent and child continue to use mktemp(), the processes will generate
| conflicting temporary names.  To resolve this, the child process
| should assign None to template, to force recomputing the default on
| the next call to mktemp().
| 
| So I have a unix process (part of mailman) that forks, and can fork
| quite a bit,  the parent process *never* calls mktemp, but the child
| processes all do, and i have darn good evidence of generation of
| duplicate file names by mktemp() under these circumstances. 
| 
| i suggest that we either fix the docs to mktemp to include this
| circumstance as an exception or make mktemp() not generate duplicates
| under these circumstances.
| 
| scott
| 
| 
| 
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