Re: fsync in glib/gio

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On Sat, 2009-03-14 at 21:02 -0400, Mark Mielke wrote:

> The debate should be over. Debating about other file systems and some 
> theoretical change to the spec is quite pointless in gtk-devel-list. At 
> best, it's a legitimate rant. At worst, it's an ignorant rant. In any 
> case, it's a rant. Fix glib/gio for the rename atomic change-in-place 
> case specifically. Everybody is happy from a glib/gio perspective. If 
> "thousands of other applications" are still broken - who cares?

The debate is far from over with this. gio should be made slower and do
unnecessary syncronous I/O in order to fulfill the standards, yes. But
there are milllions of lines of code that does the rename as atomic
replace and the chances that anywhere near a majority of those are
"fixed" is extremely slim. Therefore everyone should be aware of the
broken filesystems that don't give data-before-metadata-on-rename
guarantees so that sane people can stay away from them.