Program occasionally crashes on startup due to GNUstepDefaults.lck error

[Lobron, David]

Hello GNUstep people,

I'm debugging an occasional crash that we've observed on machines that run 20 
instances of a GNUstep-based program.  The crash does not occur often, and I 
can't reproduce it on demand, but when it does occur, we see a message like 
this: 

mapmaker_7.exe: Uncaught exception NSGenericException, reason: Unable to get 
attributes of lock file we made at 
/root/GNUstep/Defaults/.lck/.GNUstepDefaults.lck

Since the lock file path is absolute, I suspect the problem here is contention 
among the various processes for the same file if two or more of them are 
starting up at exactly the same time.  However, I would expect a lock file to 
be impervious to multiple readers.  Maybe there is a non-atomic operation 
happening here.  I searched the code for "GNUstepDefaults.lck", but I did find 
it there.  The /root/GNUstep/Defaults/.lck is normally empty, so it seems like 
this is a transient file.

Does anyone know if there's a recommended way to handle this?  Is it a known 
issue?  I checked the bug list and mailing lists, but did not see anything 
recent.

Thanks,

David