From: Olaf van der Spek Subject: Re: Atomic file data replace API Date: Mon, 27 Dec 2010 19:34:01 +0100 Message-ID: References: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Cc: linux-fsdevel , linux-ext4@vger.kernel.org To: Amir Goldstein Return-path: Received: from mail-fx0-f46.google.com ([209.85.161.46]:41216 "EHLO mail-fx0-f46.google.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1753797Ab0L0SeC (ORCPT ); Mon, 27 Dec 2010 13:34:02 -0500 In-Reply-To: Sender: linux-ext4-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: On Mon, Dec 27, 2010 at 6:20 PM, Amir Goldstein wrote: >> Don't you agree it's undesirable to lose meta-data? > > Yes I agree. you can have my vote for "it's nice to have this", > but the fact that we did without it for so long must mean something... I'm not sure it means something positive. > Anyway, you need to convince someone to implement it > (unless you do it yourself), some developers to review it > and the maintainers to accept it, so unless you come up with 'a real > world problem', > the busy FS developers will not be bothered to accept 'the fix'. > Accepting new API's has a huge price of testing them and maintaining them > every release, so don't take the resistance personally. > > Now let's say that you decide to focus on the problem of: > 'safe editor save to a file which is not owned by you but writable by you'. > You may want to look for a specific editor which has 'safe save' functionality > (maybe LibreOffice?) and query the developers if they would like the new feature > and if they would support your proposal. > > That is the way kernel development works - and for good reasons. I agree in general you need a good use case. But AFAIK FS devs are aware of many apps not doing it the right way. So I expected them to have a FAQ entry that shows what this right way is. Ted says a huge performance hit is involved, but nobody has been able to tell why yet. There's also the problem of not having permission to create a temp file. Olaf Olaf