XFS: the filesystem of the future?

so I think that your requirement results in error O_PONY

While something along the lines of what you are talking about may be able to be made to work in some more limited cases, arguing that it's a requirement because the temp-file approach doesn't work in all cases is a bad argument.

In fact, in the cases where the file is a symlink or hardlink, it's questionable as to what the 'right' think to do is.

In some cases you should follow the link and replace the 'master' file, but in other cases you should not. arguably, breaking the links is the safer thing to do (the system doesn't know what the effect of the changes are ot the other things accessing the file), but there's no question that sometimes you wish it did something different.