All callers except three passed 1 for the "fatal" parameter to ask
this function to die upon error, but to a casual reader of the code,
it was not all obvious what that 1 meant. Instead, split the
function into two based on a common write_file_v() that takes the
flag, introduce write_file_gently() as a new way to attempt creating
a file without dying on error, and make three callers to call it.