Re: Not cleaning up tempfiles for multipart?

[Charles Oliver Nutter <headius@headius.com>]

On Mon, Mar 8, 2010 at 5:26 AM, Hongli Lai <hongli@phusion.nl> wrote:
> I disagree. Software is made to be used by users, whose skills might
> vary significantly. Skilled sysadmins know how to use lsof and know
> how to take care of problems, but not everybody is or can be a skilled
> sysadmin. Server resources also vary greatly, and some people don't
> and/or cannot have have a lot of disk space. I think software should
> do the right thing even in the face of people who don't know how to
> use lsof.

And this may be the best reason for cleaning up non-memory resources
explicitly (like files and file descriptors) rather than expecting GC
to do it for you: that's how the rest of the world does it. It's
unexpected (and usually frowned upon) for a program to leave dangling
non-memory resources all over the place, even if they'll eventually
(hopefully? maybe?) get cleaned up when GC fires (if it does before
something else happens, like a hard exit).

I sympathize with the desire to be "lazy" and let GC do it all, but
that's simply not how it's done. Non-memory resources should always be
explicitly cleaned up.

- Charlie