Re: intermediate summary of ext3-2.4-0.9.4 thread

Matthias Andree
2001-08-03T18:28:15Z

On Fri, 03 Aug 2001, Stephen Tweedie wrote:

> > > The prescription for symlinks is, if you want them safely on disk you
> > > have to explicitly fsync the containing directory.
> >
> > Yes, and it doesn't matter, since MTAs don't use symlinks (symlinks
> > waste inodes on most systems).
>
> Irrelevant. We're talking about what makes sensible semantics, not
> what assumptions any specific application makes. It makes no sense to
> say that dirsync won't affect symlinks just because some existing
> applications don't rely on that!

It's rather my imagination that tracking hard links might be easier than
symlinks because hard links share the inode number. A more advanced (and
complex) implementation might prove the imagination wrong. I don't want
to consider which one is more efficient.

--
Matthias Andree