Jim Henderson wrote:
> I prefer that the system let me know about an error condition so I can 
> correct the underlying issue, when it comes to things like filesystem 
> errors.

Of course you find out about the error. I'd just prefer the system to not 
corrupt the file system when something fails.

> A silent failure wouldn't be useful - no indication of success or failure 
> would be even more confusing, IMO.

What makes you think it would be silent??

I take it you've never used a database that has transactions. What happens 
is you get back a message saying "your transaction failed because the disk 
was full" (or whatever the reason), and you don't have to do anything to put 
your changes back to how they were before you started. So if you say (for 
example) "delete all the .doc files from this directory", and one of them 
isn't deletable, none of them get deleted, and you're told which one can't 
be deleted.

> A good case to be made for doing updates on the local machine rather than 
> the remote machine.  Like I said, management procedures in place for non-
> standard deployments.

Right. That's what I'm saying.  Management procedures to work around the 
lack of functionality.

>> Cool. What's the system call in Linux that lets me change three files
>> consistemtly?  I.e., I have files /tmp/One, /tmp/Two, and /tmp/Three,
>> and I want to rename them respectively to /tmp/1, /tmp/2, and /tmp/3,
>> and I never want any possibility of an "ls" operation on the /tmp/
>> directory to show my /tmp/One and /tmp/3 at the same time, or /tmp/1 and
>> /tmp/Three.  Is there some way to accomplish that?
> 
> Again, if it's handled as part of the system update, the updater takes 
> care of that for you, not the system.

That didn't answer the question.  How does the updater make sure that you 
never see a half-renamed collection of files, even assuming we're only 
talking about the updater here?

> You want to implement a filesystem as a database, knock yourself 
> out. ;-)  It's overkill for most applications.

Not really. ext3 and reiser and all that are already implemented with 
transactions. You just can't get to them.

Post a reply to this message