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Yesterday I accidentally corrupted my project's configurations.xml by killing NetBeans while it was rewriting that file. NB should be more careful about writing those files in nbproject/. It should write a new version to a new file, e.g. configurations.xml.new, and if writing succeeds then rename configurations.xml.new file to configurations.xml. The same applies to all files under nbproject: Makefile-*.mk, Package-*.bash, qt-*.pro, *.xml.
Does other projects (Jave) do this?
Looking at AntProjectHelper I don't see such logic. So they rewrite the file in place as we currently do. However project.xml is usually less than 1 kilobyte, while our configurations.xml can be several megabytes. Chance of catching NetBeans in the middle of writing is much higher for our files.
I'm not convinced that your solution is good. If we did what you suggest we would end up with the old configuration files and you would have lost all your changes. Better than a corrupted project but still not good.
Downgrading to p4. Perhaps we need to do something but not sure what. And no urgent fix needed.