Subj : Re: Semaphore
To   : Dallas Hinton
From : Dan Cross
Date : Tue Jan 19 2021 09:56 am

On 18 Jan 2021 at 08:34a, Dallas Hinton pondered and said...
 
 DH> Hi, Dan -- on Jan 19 2021 at 03:11, you wrote:
 DH> 
 DH> DC> A couple of things, but the biggest one I can think of is fragility
 DH> DC> in the face of system crashes.  In particular, who's responsible for
 DH> DC> cleaning this file up?  Should `binkd` delete it as part of gracefully
 DH> 
 DH> FWIW, I have a batch file that runs on startup and deletes all semaphore
 DH> flags. They're all in the same directory so it's easy.

Yeah, that's _a_ design, but doesn't really address the
question.  The program author still has to make some kind
of design decision about what to do if the file exists
when the program starts up (suppose someone starts it
directly, without running the script that deletes the files
ahead of time?).

More generally, the issue in this discussion is that the
request for a feature has been wrapped up in details about
the implementation of that feature.  From my observation,
that's the central source of friction.

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