On Sat, Nov 25, 2000 at 11:02:54AM -0500, Daniel Burrows wrote: > > How about this: "While it's possible to make a program deal with any user > unput without crashing, this just won't ever happen." Based on empirical > observation, this is just as true..hmm, maybe I should close a raft of bugs > against my packages }=) The difference between that and my original reasoning that originally, I did not believe at that time that there was a solution (mostly because I thought that rename() would also fail on a full disk, an error that I am gratified to note has been made by at least one other person in this thread). I have never claimed to be a master programmer, and I claim the right to make mistakes. If he had bothered to correct my mistake the first time I closed the bug, this mess would never have gotten this far. If he hadn't felt the need to taunt me on a public list, this might have been dealt with by now. A better analogy to what happened from my perspective might be, "While it's possible to make a program with an interactive display on XWindows stay running and retain its state even when the user presses CTL-ALT-BSP, to do so is unfeasable and to expect it to happen for every program is unreasonable." Nick has a past history of being unreasonable, and I've been under a bit of stress lately, so perhaps I was less willing to extend him the benefit of the doubt than I should have been. I apologize for this. I place as a footnote, however, that having him blindly reopen the bug without bothering to comment upon my reasoning frankly didn't make me any more inclined to take him seriously. > > Yes, it's good coding practice to check every function for successful > > completion, but how often does that really happen in > > non-critical code? > > Well, I'd hope quite often. In this case, in my original reasoning, it wouldn't have helped, since the damage would have been done by the time the error message was read. > Luckily, it looks like the maintainer finally understands that writing a > temporary file and using rename() is a good idea, so maybe he'll forward it.. I understood that it was a good idea as soon as I realized that it was actually a functioning solution. That happened as soon as Nick bothered to respond to my closure explanation, which I will note didn't happen until _after_ he posted to this list. As is stated in the bug logs, it will get forwarded sometime next week, once I've had time to calm down and get on a regular sleep cycle again. I'm not normally so thin skinned, but as I said, I'm under a bit of stress and the nerves are a little raw, and I don't want to be composing a request to an upstream author who has sometimes been a little touchy when every time I think about it my blood pressure rises. Having to respond to this thread hasn't helped any, either. -- Zed Pobre <zed@debian.org> a.k.a. Zed Pobre <zed@resonant.org> PGP key and fingerprint available on finger; encrypted mail welcomed.
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