Subject: Re: bug#57129: 29.0.50; Improve behavior of conditionals in Eshell

From: Paul Eggert <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 16 Aug 2022 09:54:25 -0700

On 8/16/22 09:25, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> The programmer didn't
> expect that because it is natural to expect each call to a function
> that creates a temporary file to create a file under a new name, not
> reuse the same name.

Regardless of whether the programmer expects a random name or a 
predictable-but-unique name, there are only a finite number of names to 
choose from so the programmer must take into account the possibility 
that the chosen name clashes with names that the programmer would prefer 
not to be chosen.

This means an Emacs patch such as [1] is needed regardless of whether 
Gnulib's gen_tempname is changed to be more random than it is. Although 
it's true that the bug fixed by [1] is less likely if gen_tempname 
generates more-random names, the bug can occur no matter what we do 
about gen_tempname.

[1] 
https://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?filename=0001-Don-t-create-temp-file-with-same-name-as-visited.patch;bug=57129;msg=59;att=2