Re: The argument for fs assistance in handling archives

David Masover
2004-09-03T00:41:11Z

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Martin J. Bligh wrote:
|>For 30 years nothing much has happened in Unix filesystem semantics
|>because of sheer cowardice
|
|
| Or because it works fine, and isn't broken.

Ok, maybe it wasn't cowardice. Maybe it was laziness.

Because cowardice tells me that data corruption is bad. Data corruption
kills kittens. End data corruption now!

Unfortunately, the only way to allow files to survive a crash is to
implement transactions. The simplest way is to do it in the filesystem
and to export an interface to userland. This is what Hans is doing,
though AFAIK it's not done yet.

Laziness tells me that I should just use Windows anyway, because "it
works". Switching to Linux requires training, porting apps requires
work, and using Linux instead of Windows is a hell of a lot more work
than just patching programs to do something like

+ start_transaction()
~ write()
~ blah()
~ write()
+ end_transaction()

How'd you like to be able to tell users "If a file gets corrupted, it's
either a bug in OpenOffice or your hardware eats data."
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