[Openmcl-devel] upcoming 1.6 release

[Nikodemus Siivola]

On 12 October 2010 20:25, R. Matthew Emerson <rme at clozure.com> wrote:

> It seems pointless to have a function that deletes a directory, but
> only if it's empty:  usually what one wants is to remove a directory
> and all its contents.  There seems little use in having something
> like (delete-directory :recursive-p nil), but maybe there's a reason
> I haven't thought of.

Attempting to delete a directory you thought was empty but isn't --
which typically means that you're either deleting the wrong directory,
or someone has been putting stuff in there that you're not aware of.

I think it's a good thing to be able to say "I expect it to be empty"
-- especially since recursive deletion is inherently racy anyways.
Unless you're willing to keep trying forever, you still have the
failure-mode of "someone else was writing into the directory while I
was trying to delete it".

*shrug*

Cheers,

 -- Nikodemus