Re: Problem editing file

[Ben Pfaff]

John Darrington <address@hidden> writes:

> On Fri, Mar 20, 2009 at 12:26:25AM -0300, Michel Boaventura wrote:
>      > I'm also trying to use one windows function to do it (MoveFileEx). Let
>      > see if it works.
>      
>      Well, it works. I can save a file just clicking on the "SAVE" button.
>      
>      What I did was change the "rename" to:
>      ok = MoveFileEx(rf->tmp_name, rf->file_name, MOVEFILE_REPLACE_EXISTING) 
> != 0;
>      
>      and insert an "#include <windows.h>" on the top of the file.
>      
>      I need to use "!= 0" because it only returns zero if a error happens.
>      
>      Now I guess that if you or john put a precompiler option to change it
>      if we are compiling to linux or windows we could solve this issue.
>
> I don't think it's really pspp's role to fix buggy mingw behaviour.
> It should be done by the the Mingw, libc or gnulib people.  (at this
> stage, I'm not sure which).  If none of the maintainers of those
> libraries will do it, then we could look at fixing it in pspp, but I
> think that should be a last resort.

I guess that this is a Mingw issue.  C99 says the following about
rename:

    If a file named by the string pointed to by new exists prior
    to the call to the rename function, the behavior is
    implementation-defined.

POSIX defines this behavior as (see
http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/functions/rename.html):

    If the directory named by the new argument exists, it shall
    be removed and old renamed to new.

Whereas Windows has a contradictory specification (see
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/zw5t957f.aspx):

    The new name must not be the name of an existing file or
    directory.

I guess that we should follow up to a mingw mailing list.
-- 
Aim to please, shoot to kill.