On 8/4/2011 21:17, Jim Henderson wrote:
> what he's seeing is part of the standard filesystem
> behaviour.

Nah. I can overwrite a config file, or I can write a new file and rename it 
to be the config file, and these are entirely different things on Linux. The 
package manager just happens to do the latter.


The whole story is basically:

1) We can't just fork, because glib and other libraries might have locks 
open, and in that case things with threads break, and we use threads.

2) We can't just fork+exec, because if we exec, we get the new version of 
the executable which expects the new versions of files and it might not 
communicate well with the existing running processes.

3) So instead we start a helper process to hold open all the old versions of 
files because that's the only way to keep them from being deleted once 
they're unlinked, and the package manager unlinks old versions of files. And 
stuff often breaks if we forget to make sure every file we might need gets 
versioned this way.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   How come I never get only one kudo?

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