Ben Pfaff wrote: > I agree that the Windows implementation is, arguably, C99 and > POSIX compliant. But I claim that it has an unreasonably poor > quality of implementation, bad enough that we should replace it. > If a Unix-like system implemented its tmpfile in a similar way, > by always attempting to create a file in the root directory and > failing if permissions were lacking, I imagine that we'd all > accept that this is a poor implementation that should be > replaced. > > To me the Microsoft documentation seems like a red herring. The > way I've always thought about Gnulib is that it allows a GNU > program to make assumptions about its environment that GNU > programmers find comfortable, by covering up the differences > where it is possible. For example, GNU programmers find it > comfortable to assume that malloc(0) returns non-null, so Gnulib > helps with that.
Paul, what's your opinion on this? Should gnulib includes overrides under the same function name, even if they contradict the respective platform's documentation? > > Can you elaborate, please? clean-temp guarantees that the file will be > > removed in most cases. You want it removed earlier, as soon as the fclose > > happens? To save disk space? > > Yes: PSPP uses temporary files for transposing big matrices, > out-of-core merge sorting, and so on, so it's a good idea to free > up disk space when it can. But with the clean-temp module, you can arrange yourself to free the disk space as soon as possible: just call cleanup_temp_file right after close_temp. The only feature that _O_TEMPORARY provides is that the file is removed if the process crashes. Bruno
