[Python-Dev] best place for an atomic file API (original) (raw)

Nick Coghlan ncoghlan at gmail.com
Thu Feb 16 03:45:55 CET 2012

On Thu, Feb 16, 2012 at 11:49 AM, Ben Finney <ben+python at benfinney.id.au> wrote:

No, I have no objection to that implementation. I'm pointing that out only because the nature of the functionality implies I'd expect to find it within the ‘os’ module hierarchy.

The (very) rough rule of thumb is that the os module handles abstracting away cross-platform differences in implementation details, while the higher level shutil algorithms can be largely platform independent by using the shared abstractions in the os module layer. In this case, os.replace() is the cross platform abstraction, while the atomic file context manager is just a particular use case for that new feature.

(MvL complained in the tracker issue about a lack of concrete use cases, but I think fixing race conditions when overwriting bytecode files in importlib and the existing distutils/packaging use cases cover that)

Cheers, Nick.

-- Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia

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