Re: [Bug-gnubg] Player records

[Joern Thyssen]

On Thu, Oct 03, 2002 at 09:19:05AM +0100, Ian Shaw wrote
> 
> > 
> > The logic for adding a player's record is:
> > 
> > * read records from .gnubgpr
> > * calculate new records
> > * write new records to .gnubgprXXXXX
> > * rename .gnubgprXXXXX to .gnubgpr
> > 
> > However, for some reason the last step fails on wintendo. 
> > I've modified
> > the logic to:
> > 
> > * read records from .gnubgpr
> > * calculate new records
> > * write new records to .gnubgprXXXXX
> > * delete .gnubgpr
> > * rename .gnubgprXXXXX to .gnubgpr
> > 
> > which apparently seems to work -- don't ask me why :-)
> > 
> This is standard for Windows. You can't rename a file to something
> that already exists, 'coz then you'd have two files of the same name
> in a directory.  I guess the Unix philosophy assumes you know what you
> are doing and that you WANT to overwrite the existing file, 

Yes, rename/move are synonymous under unix. 

> whereas
> Windows assumes that you DON'T know what you're doing.  

Exactly! This is probably one of the reasons why I detest using windows :-)

> The other
> thing that Win programs often do is to rename .gnubgpr to .gnubgpr.bak
> at step 4

Yes, but then I'll have to add logic to delete .gnubgpr.bak before step 4 :-)

> 
> One thing that Win files don't do is have filenames beginning with "."
> because that marks the file type. Is there a good Unix reason to have
> this sort of name. 

Yes! Your personal settings are always stored in a file or directory
that starts with dot. My home directory is /home/jth (corresponds to
C:\Documents and Settings\jth in Win2K). My personal settings for gnubg
are stored in a file .gnubgrc, settings for Mozilla in a directory
.mozilla, settings for my mail program in .mutt etc etc. My wifes
personal settings are stored in /home/malene. So my wife and I can have
separate settings. 

The program for listing files (ls) doesn't show files starting with '.'
as default, similar to the dos attribute "hidden". 

> In windows it would be more usual to have a
> filename such as gnubg.ini for initialisation files, and records.dat
> for the player records.

Yes, it might be an idea to change this. 

Jørn

-- 
Joern Thyssen, PhD
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