Re: [Gnu-arch-users] FL-COW ...

[Miles Bader]

On Fri, Oct 03, 2003 at 06:13:10PM -0700, Davide Libenzi wrote:
> > Yeah, but using those programs, things will work fine even without FL-COW.
> 
> I like to be sure that my environment does the right thing. In my case
> would result in a missing patch hunk, while with tla there might be more
> serious problems.

Sure, I was just hinting it might not be the best test of whether your
library works or not. :-)

> In emacs I do not use backup files, that's why it corrupts hard links. I'm
> not 100% sure but I think that none of these tools handle the concept of
> hard links, and if they do the right thing (COW) is only because of the
> particular sequence of operations they do.

I guess it's fair to say that -- I believe in both cases (emacs and patch)
it's because they use the write-new-file-rename style of updating a file,
which is an easy and convenient way of doing at atomic file updates.
However, I suspect that the authors were at least aware of the ramifications
on hard-link behavior, since this is a very widely used technique...

-miles
-- 
"Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that
 you do it."  Mahatma Ghandi