Resource leaks from FieldFile's implicit open?

Dear group,

despite a lot of reading and searching I still don't understand how FieldFiles work.

The documentation at https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/4.0/ref/models/fields/#django.db.models.fields.files.FieldFile says:

> The API of FieldFile mirrors that of File, with one key difference: The object wrapped by the class is not necessarily a wrapper around Python's built-in file object. Instead, it is a wrapper around *** the result of the Storage.open() method ***, which may be a File object, or it may be a custom storage's implementation of the File API.

(I added markers to indicate the portion that I have trouble with.)

As far as I understand this, whenever a `FieldFile` is instantiated, `Storage.open()` is called. Thus, if the underlying storage is the `FileSystemStorage`, a Python file object is opened.

However, how is this file handle closed again?

It looks as if it stays open until garbage collected, that is, possibly for a very long time.

Another consequence besides the potential resource leak seems to be that the implicit open will raise an exception if the file that the `FieldFile` refers to doesn't exist. As I don't exactly understand when this opening occurs, a lot of code must be wrapped in try-except blocks to handle this?

Best regards,
Carsten

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