Re: ReiserFS patch for updating ctimes of renamed files

From: Hans Reiser
Date: Tue Oct 14 2003 - 01:10:42 EST


Let's see what Andrew says after he reads J.W.'s reasoning. I agree that reiserfs should do the same thing as the other filesystems in Linux, but J.W. seems to be right that they are doing the wrong thing.

Hans

Alex Adriaanse wrote:

Hans,

Yes, I agree with J.W. However, I also think that Andrew has a good point
in that the behavior across Linux filesystems (ReiserFS, ext2, ext3, minix,
etc.) should be consistent. Either they should all update ctime during
renames, or none of them should.

Anyway, I'll try to work with the GNU tar maintainer to get this problem in
tar fixed. It'll probably be a lot harder to fix in tar than to have
ReiserFS update ctimes since it'll require major changes in
the --listed-incremental snapshot files. However, if you don't think it's a
good idea to make these changes to ReiserFS then we'll just work on fixing
up tar.

Thanks,

Alex

-----Original Message-----
From: linux-kernel-owner@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:linux-kernel-owner@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]On Behalf Of Hans Reiser
Sent: Monday, October 13, 2003 3:46 AM
To: Alex Adriaanse
Cc: jw schultz; Linux Kernel Mailing List; vs@xxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: ReiserFS patch for updating ctimes of renamed files


Alex, are you convinced by jw? (I think I am.) Would you be willing to
submit a patch for tar instead?

Hans

jw schultz wrote:



On Mon, Oct 13, 2003 at 09:49:20AM +0400, Hans Reiser wrote:


In theory it is cleaner and purer to do it the way we did. In practice,



Alex's problem seems like a real one, and I don't know how hard it is to
change tar to do the right thing. We'll discuss it in a small seminar
today.




Updating ctime does seem messy and a bit irrelevant for the
atomic rename. You are modifying the directories not the
fricken file. This isn't DOS! But it would seem he does
indeed have an issue although i'm not sure what. I've never
used the listed-incremental option of tar and since the
manpage is incomplete <rant deleted> i don't know what it
actually does. However, i have found the use of ctime to be
terribly unreliable for file management and given what the
standards have to say on the issue it sounds like tar is
being abused or has a bug.








--
Hans


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