Re: threads and kill-buffer

[Stefan Monnier]

>> How about letting kill-buffer succeed, but delay the actual deletion
>> of the buffer until no thread has it as current, like what Posix
>> filesystems do with file deletion?
> I am not sure that Posix file systems do this "by design" and not as a
> side effect of an implementation detail.

I highly doubt it was a side effect of implementation.
More specifically, the implementation has to go to extra length to do
this.  And it is also a natural result of the design decision that aimed
at making read&write as lean&mean as possible, pushing the heavy lifting
to `open'.

> At any rate, I don't think this behavior is very useful.

To the extent that you can get virtually the same result by renaming the
file to a well-hidden name, it's pretty useful since it turns this
"special situation" into a situation that client code has to deal
with anyway thus reducing the number of special cases.

Note that for buffers, it's a bit different since a buffer can only have
a single name and that it always has one name, so while you can't
reliably ask for the file-name corresponding to a POSIX file-descriptor,
you can reliably ask for the buffer-name of the current buffer.


        Stefan