Little bits of atomicity...

Martin Langhoff martin.langhoff at gmail.com
Wed Feb 11 00:35:24 EST 2009


Hacking on bits of Browse is taking me down the path of reading
various random bits of Sugar. And I wanted to drop a quick note...

Modern POSIX systems give us a cheap safe atomic way of dealing with
updates to small files: write to a tempfile and move it into place.
Opening a critical file in place for update is fraught with problems,
specially on a device where power is not guaranteed...

 ... like a schoolserver or a laptop...

(That's the mantra I've taken with the XS. All the code must be failsafe.)

Anyway, I tried to craft a patch for profile.py, only to find it's now
gone gconf. So no patch today :-/

Having switched to gconf, I wonder, is there a plan for what to do
when people need to fiddle with their Sugar config stuff? gconftool is
significantly harder to use than nano or vi.

cheers,


m
-- 
 martin.langhoff at gmail.com
 martin at laptop.org -- School Server Architect
 - ask interesting questions
 - don't get distracted with shiny stuff  - working code first
 - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff



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