Date: Mon, 25 Oct 2004 01:29:10 -0700
From: Chris Wedgwood <cw@f00f.org>
To: Timo Sirainen <tss@iki.fi>
Cc: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: readdir loses renamed files
Message-ID: <20041025082910.GA17089@taniwha.stupidest.org>
References: <431547F9-2624-11D9-8AC3-000393CC2E90@iki.fi>
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On Mon, Oct 25, 2004 at 04:21:57AM +0300, Timo Sirainen wrote:

> My problem is that mails in a large maildir get temporarily
> lost. This happens because readdir() never returns a file which was
> just rename()d by another process. Either new or the old name would
> have been fine, but it's not returned at all.

i don't think there are well defined semantics for this, it's
intrinsically hard to make it work the way you want for a number of
reasons (and what they are depends on the underlying fs)

> Is there a chance this could get fixed? Every OS/filesystem I've
> tested so far has had the same problem

i'll argue it's an application bug

> so I'll have to implement some extra locking anyway (so much for
> maildir being lockless), but it would be nice to have at least one
> OS where it works without the extra locking overhead.

why do you need extra locking?  the next time the maildir is scanned
the message(s) will appear surely?


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