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> Does it have to be a class? What would be the operations apart from
> write()?
Well, I thought that making it a file-like object could be useful:
that way, one could pass it to pickle.dump(), logging.StreamHandler or
any method expecting a file-like object, and would gain atomicity
(persistency) transparently, without refactoring.
My quick and dirty AtomicFile implementation reused the
_TemporaryFileWrapper attribute delagation trick:
"""
 def __getattr__(self, name):
 # Attribute lookups are delegated to the underlying file
 # and cached for non-numeric results
 # (i.e. methods are cached, closed and friends are not)
 file = self.__dict__['file']
 a = getattr(file, name)
 if not issubclass(type(a), type(0)):
 setattr(self, name, a)
 return a
"""
>> Still shutil?
>
> I think that's our best compromise.
OK.
I don't have a strong opinion about this, and you've got much more
experience than me, so I trust your judgement ;-)