ubuntu-phone team mailing list archive

[Alberto Mardegan <alberto.mardegan@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

On 20.05.2015 17:19, Iain Lane wrote:
> We sometimes come across bugs where software expects to be able to
> rename files to work properly (either to atomically update, or perhaps
> to disable some functionality).

I think that most of the trickiness comes from the fact that these 
renames are not made intentionally by the developer, but by a library.
The developer might not even be aware of the fact that a library call is 
renaming a file.

I encountered a similar problem with libexiv2, which also does 
occasional renames when writing big files. For the record, I encountered 
this problem under OS X: my app had read/write access to an file, but 
not to other files in the same directory.

In other words, this problem is not Ubuntu specific: cross-platform code 
which is expecting renames to work is not really cross platform, and 
should be fixed.

IMHO, the g_file_set_contents() should be fixed; how, I'm not sure. My 
guess is that the rename should be attempted and, if that fails, a set 
of fallbacks should be implemented (the one from your branch is indeed a 
good one).

In implementing the fix, one should also keep in mind
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1220713

Ciao,
  Alberto