Philipp Stephani wrote:

> there's no way to special-case
> casing changes while keeping atomicity intact. So I'd rather have Emacs
> react conservatively and skip the casing check entirely.

Yes, that makes sense, at least for macOS.

> Note that the manpage says:
> 
> RENAME_EXCL   On file systems that support it (see getattrlist(2)
> VOL_CAP_INT_RENAME_EXCL), it will cause EEXIST to be returned if the
> destination already exists.
> 
> I interpret this such that if the filesystem doesn't support RENAME_EXCL
> the rename will succeed even if the destination exists.

I interpret it to mean that if the filesystem doesn't support RENAME_EXCL, the 
rename will fail with errno == EINVAL or ENOSYS.  At least, that's how it works 
under GNU/Linux. If it behaved the way you suggest, there'd be no good way to 
emulate RENAME_EXCL on filesystems lacking it, which would surely not be Apple's 
intent.

Please check this, though. I installed the patch on 'master' to help you do that.

Now that renameat_noreplace works on DOS_NT, would it make sense to apply the 
attached further patch as well? If we can get renameat_noreplace to work on 
Cygwin the we could simplify the fileio.c code even further.

> Since we probably won't be able to solve all issues across operating
> systems and filesystems, probably we should have at least a warning in the
> documentation that rename-file attempts to be race-free and atomic, but
> only on a best-effort basis.

True. I'd like to get the directory issue fixed before worrying about this, 
though. (That way I don't have to document the security holes in the current 
implementation. :-) I'll follow up separately about that.