backstory: we’ve been having some minor difficulty with some of our anti-spam systems, because they keep running out of disk space. i opened a trouble ticket after about the third time that running out of disk space resulted in breaking the product’s update management software, requesting that they change the package manager to stop truncating its “here’s what i have installed!” file. tech support told me to stop running out of disk space. i’m kind of proud of this analogy.

I’m sorry, but from a programming standpoint, that’s not an acceptable answer. C’mon, seriously. That’s like saying that if you run out of gas on a deserted country road in east Texas on a dark moonless night and have no way to get back to civilisation, when the Beastman comes out of the woods and tears your car into bits and eats all your favorite CDs, you just have to make sure that you never run out of gas. While that’s fine advice in principle, a better response would be to be prepared in the event that the Beastman attacks you so you can recover. In real life, just as sometimes you run out of gas when the Beastman is on the prowl, sometimes you run out of disk space when ppm is trying to make a write. And much like carrying Beastman repellent while travelling through east Texas, checking to make sure that you have enough disk space to write a new copy of the ppm.xml file before you smash the old one is a good way to lead a happy, long life.

Yes, yes, there’s a backup, that’s well and good, but it would be even better if you never corrupted the live one to begin with.

(And if you can’t do that, at least throwing a giant glaring message out on standard error that says “Yo! Your ppm.xml file is now worthless! Go restore the backed up version or suffer the consequences!” would be nice.)

grumpily,
–sabrina

seriously. how hard is it to (a) write the new ppm.xml file, (b) check status and size and make sure it is what it ought to be, then (c) move the existing ppm.xml file to the backup file, then (d) finally move the temp ppm.xml file to be the real ppm.xml file? sheesh.

also, that analogy was drawn on slightly-exaggerated real life experience: i almost did run out of gas on a country road in east texas last summer. fortunately, i passed through some tiny podunk town when i was down to like 30 miles left on the tank. which is good, because i wouldn’t want the beastman to attack and eat all my favorite CDs.