[Geany-devel] Overwriting a link on save as

[Colomban Wendling]

Le 02/03/2011 01:59, Lex Trotman a écrit :
> On 2 March 2011 10:57, Colomban Wendling <lists.ban at herbesfolles.org> wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> A user (yecril71pl) on #geany reported that saving as a file with the
>> name of a symbolic link correctly ask for replacing but will try to
>> modify the file at the location pointed by the link rather than
>> replacing the link by a new file. This is IMHO at least not expected,
>> and may be problematic if e.g. the target of that link isn't writable,
>> since the write will fail (if using unsafe file saving).
> 
> Hi Colomban,
> 
> It does the same with hard linked files, ie it modifies the file
> rather than replacing it, and so changes the file for all the links,
> again probably not what was expected. So I think "save as" should
> always delete the file (if it exists) before saving, not just on
> symlink.
Right, good point.
However removing the file have drawbacks, such as we might not be able
to create it back if e.g. we don't have write permissions on the parent
directory but only on that particular file -- though, AFAIK you can't
remove a file in a directory you can't write to, so it isn't a problem.

OTOH maybe it's anyway not a real problem to lose the file upon wired
failure when use_safe_file_saving is false?

Maybe the best fix would be to use g_file_set_contents() (aka safe file
saving currently) when saving as? So we don't lose the original if we
haven't the new one... but we then assume that safe file saving is
implemented as temp file writing and rename.
It probably depends on whether we can assume or not that if we
successfully removed the original file we'll be able to create the new one.

Again, thoughts?


Regards,
Colomban