Re: More on Hard Links (was A bold idea (Re: Carrying Attributes too Far))

["Alexander G. M. Smith" <agmsmith@rogers.com>]

Nikita Danilov wrote on Fri, 5 Dec 2003 17:17:48 +0300:
> Deadlock detection and/or avoidance will be a nightmare to
> implement. And at one point or another you need to keep all directories
> in the "closure" to be locked, which means, that their inodes have to be
> in memory, which means that if file-size / mem-size ratio is large, you
> are in trouble.

It was a bit of a pain.  If it runs out of in-memory inodes (the BeOS
equivalent), it just fails with a suitable error code (and log
message).  Then it's up to the user to delete things in smaller chunks.
Same sort of thing for deadlocks - after a while it times out and
the user has to do smaller deletions.

Incidentally, renaming files is a superset of the delete operation.
Implement that first, and you have delete for free.

- Alex