Comment Re:Pointless battles (Score 1) 360
While no doubt the atomicity of rename() will prop up the code of naive programmers, there's a great deal more to the operation in question than just changing the file name. Once again, oversimplifying the solution ensures that subtle bugs remain. As for the comment "relatively safe", that's like saying a 39-story fall from the roof of a 40-story building is "relatively healthy".
And of course, if your world is only POSIX and Windows, then portability is still an unrealized goal.
Every two-bit peachfuzz-face programmer in the open source world thinks he has the solution to lots of long-standing bugs. Being able to read what a spec says and actually understanding how it works in actual implementations. For example, what's the behavior of rename() if the file is actually a symbolic link? Patches or GTFO.