[PythonCAD] Post nineteenth release plans

[Eric Wilhelm]

# The following was supposedly scribed by
# Art Haas
# on Tuesday 16 November 2004 09:24 am:

>A better approach
>would be to save the file with a temporary name, and if that save is
>successful then make the backup and rename the temporary file to the
>correct name. This way, the existing file is not tampered with until
> the new file has been completely saved, so any glitches in saving
> the new file will not require you to rename a backup copy.

One caveat in this scheme:  You cannot save into a symlink (or a hard 
link for that matter.)

Maybe this is solved by getting all of the XML into an in-memory 
string, and then open(file, 'w') the file and write into it.  
However, here I'm assuming that your main concern about failed saves 
is during creation of the XML.

If you really need an atomic write action, then you would have to 
follow a symlink back to the original and perform your os.rename() 
operation there.  However, readlink() only works on symlinks, not 
hard links, so this scheme doesn't do everything that open(file, 'w') 
does.

Let's forget about links for a second and just note that using a 
rename will lose any existing permissions on a file, creating 
problems where a file is shared between users (if I set a file as a+r 
and that is not the default of my umask, then pythoncad will make my 
setting go away whenever I save.)  There is also an issue of who 
saves the file (I believe any user can write into a file with a+w 
permissions, but only the owner can remove it (or move, or rename on 
top of it.))  Also, note the implications of same on your backup file 
strategy.  Maybe you need to actually open() the backup and then read 
the current file into it, then open() the destination file and write 
the new XML.  Then, as long as you have write permission on both 
files, everything is okay, regardless of who owns them.

--Eric
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