EFS feature suggestion: atomic saves

XEmacs already has two backup mechanisms, so I hesitate to suggest a third, but I think it's warranted. Autosaves save your data every n seconds in case of a program crash. That's good. Backups save your data on every save, so you have a minimal form of revision tracking and recovery. Also good, meeting a different need. But what I'd really like to see is, when invoking write-file on a remote file, for EFS to transfer the file to a temporary file on the remote location, and then - iff the transfer succeeds - immediately rename the file to it's proper filename. Maybe an option to do things the old way, but I can't at the moment think of any case why this new behavior wouldn't be an improvement, unless there are systems that don't support renaming via FTP. Impetus: Right now, I'm having all sorts of connectivity problems. If the socket gets destroyed or confused while EFS is in mid-write, the file at the other end gets truncated. Not good. It can be argued that this is a failure in the ftpd implementation, not EFS, but I suspect that most other FTP applications aren't repeatedly overwriting the same filename, so it goes unnoticed. I've lost two source files in three days this way. How difficult would it be, and is my proposal the right way to do it? I'd offer to code it, but something tells me this isn't a particularly good project for a novice elisp programmer.. just a hunch, you know. Jay Levitt | This is not the start of World War III Wellesley, MA | No political ploys jay(a)jay.fm | I think both your constitutions are http://www.jay.fm | terrific, so now you know - be good boys.