On 13/12/15 10:48 PM, Christopher Browne wrote:

http://danluu.com/file-consistency/

I found it interesting that ReiserFS was pointed at as having amongst the best handling of errors, passing them back sensibly to applications.

Also interesting was that they pointed at using SQLite as a way of mostly hiding applications from worrying about such troubles.

Also entertaining was the notion of "MBox considered harmful"; makes me like MH and Maildir all the better, as they have the merit of storing a message per file, so that there's fewer concurrency issues surrounding re-opening files and rewriting them. (Possibly I'm wrong, and the problem just shifts to directory metadata access...)

--

When confronted by a difficult problem, solve it by reducing it to the
question, "How would the Lone Ranger handle this?"
---
Talk Mailing List
talk@gtalug.org
http://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk

Updating a mailbox is an example of using the smallest possible set of primitives from V6.
It was done in such a way that exactly and only one binary did the task, and depended only
on the atomicity of creat(O_EXCL), seek and and write.

It's surprisingly hard, much as is creating a directory entry, and is one of the examples we
were told to understand when studying Unix, as they were wildly different from OS/360 and GCOS.

--dave

-- 
David Collier-Brown,         | Always do right. This will gratify
System Programmer and Author | some people and astonish the rest
davecb@spamcop.net           |                      -- Mark Twain