davidsen@steinmetz.ge.com (William E. Davidsen Jr) (12/17/88)
I have been testing the 3.10 beta version of MicroEMACS, and, since my
mail seems broken to the author, I am posting some problems I have had,
with suggested fixes. Some machine between us seems to be dropping my
mail into a black hole.
Hopefully these will be useful to fellow beta testers until the
"official" version comes out. This posting details a fix for the only
action I would call a major problem.
SAFESAVE logic
v3.10 has "safe save" logic, which can present four major problems when
used. The "safesave" writes a copy of the original file to the disk,
deletes the original, and renames the copy. These are:
Data loss:
In DOS or UNIX if making two copies of a file runs you out of disk (or
quota) the changes will be lost.
Overwriting Read-Only files:
In DOS or UNIX the original file is not checked to see if it is
read-only. The copy is written and it replaces the original, without
checking the original file status.
Loss of permissions:
In DOS or UNIX the file created by safe save will have owner r/w,
world read permissions. This allows other programs to trash the file,
since it's not r/o. In UNIX it also causes SCCS to fail if the file was
r/o, and may leave a system file, such as L.sys, readable.
Loss of ownership:
In UNIX the last person to edit a file becomes the owner, and his/her
group the group owner. This can result in locking people out of files
and backups failing.
Comment:
If the variable "ssave" in defs.h is initialized FALSE, the user will
get the same default behavior as all previous version of MicroEMACS.
Note:
This is not in any way a bug, just a configuration issue which will
seriously bite you if you are unaware of it. "SAFESAVE" is useful if you
are using a floppy system with unreliable disks, to reduce the chance of
data loss.
--
bill davidsen (wedu@ge-crd.arpa)
{uunet | philabs}!steinmetz!crdos1!davidsen
"Stupidity, like virtue, is its own reward" -me