Re: [Scrollkeeper-devel] Porblem with temporary files creation

[Dan M. <mu...@al...>]

On Wed, 2 Oct 2002, Sander Vesik wrote:

> On Thu, 3 Oct 2002, Malcolm Tredinnick wrote:
> 
> > On Wed, Oct 02, 2002 at 01:56:18PM +0100, Sander Vesik wrote:
> > > On Wed, 2 Oct 2002, Malcolm Tredinnick wrote:
> > > 
> > > > > As a temporary fix, isn't it possible to have only one temporary file by 
> > > > > user, suffixed by the login name?
> > > > > /tmp/scrollkeeper-tempfile.<login name>
> > > > 
> > > > That's not a bad idea. There may be some situation where more than one
> > > > file is required (I must admit to not having thought about why five was
> > > > chosen), but a per-user system using login name is something to work
> > > > with in any case. Kind of obvious, in retrospect. :-)
> > > > 
> > > 
> > > Please don't do this - it will give bad results if you are logged in into
> > > an account more than once and the machines have different databases.
> > 
> > No it won't, because you still have to allow multiple files, so
> > scrollkeeper will still return a filename specific for that run. You
> > can't just have a single file (or even just a limited number of files)
> > or predicatable names because otherwise there is the same denial of
> > service situation as before.
> > 
> 
> Right - just that Benjamin's /tmp/scrollkeeper-tempfile.<login name>
> pattern always matches just one file. 8-)

Hi all.  It sounds like a pretty good concensus has been reached that we 
should:
(1) For 0.3.x, insert the login name in the tempfile, while keeping the 
incremented # from 0 to 5.
(2) For 0.5.x and later, possibly abandon the use of temporary files all 
together.

Agreed?

For (2), I'd be interested to hear arguments for or against it.  We always
planned to turn ScrollKeeper into a proper library, but started with
scripts so that it would be simple and easy for people to use with help
browsers written in different languages or using different XML libraries.  
The script approach won't work when ScrollKeeper gets more complex, so the
scripts would eventually have to be replaced by one or more libraries.
Right now, I'm starting to wonder if using scripts and temporary files was
more trouble than it was worth.  Is there a value in keeping the scripts
and temporary files, or do people think we should turn ScrollKeeper
strictly into a C library which passes XML trees around?

-Dan