On Sat, 22 Nov 2008 09:46:38 -0800, Darren New wrote:

> Jim Henderson wrote:
>> why would you not be able to update it consistently?
> 
> You write the .h file. While trying to write the .so file, you A) don't
> have permissions to do so,

The updater requires root rights to run, so it has permissions to do that.

> B) find that it's open by someone else as a shared text segment, 

I don't believe that would matter, again, it's the inode that's open, and 
when the file is overwritten a new inode is created and the old one is 
destroyed.

> C) run out of disk space,

That would create other problems as well - as would running out of system 
filehandles (which is interesting to watch on *nix systems - I wrote a 
program to malloc() all the memory in a system once when in college - was 
to get students off of workstations when they were playing the local MUD 
if there were students who had actual work to do and there were no 
machines available.  Once the malloc() program ran they couldn't even run 
ps to find out what happened - just had to stop-A the system and reboot.  
Interesting to watch on the Sun SLC Diskless workstations, because they'd 
swap over the network to the server in the server room - which is 
invariably where we ran it from, so we could see all the disk activity.

> D) have your process killed,
> E) have the power fail,
> ....

Yeah, those could happen and could introduce problems - so you just 
reinstall the packages and that makes things consistent.  Come to think, 
I've had to do that once or twice.

Jim

Post a reply to this message