#2413 HIGH Trial-3: User should not know about "unmounting"

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#2413: User should not know about "unmounting"
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  Reporter:  Zack              |       Owner:  tomeu  
      Type:  defect            |      Status:  new    
  Priority:  high              |   Milestone:  Trial-3
 Component:  journal-activity  |     Version:         
Resolution:                    |    Keywords:         
  Verified:  0                 |  
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Changes (by jg):

  * priority:  blocker => high
  * milestone:  Untriaged => Trial-3

Comment:

 At least part of this is not soluble even if you make this synchronous; a
 truncated file is corrupted at an application level, and you can't avoid
 that, or that kids may pull USBs out without warning.

 At best, we can indicate it is safe to unplug a device.

 VFAT, for all its warts, is pretty synchronous for its meta-data (file
 name, dates, etc); its relatively robust to such behavior, though it pays
 for this in lower performance than a UNIX/Linux file system such as ext3
 or others.  It does cache data writes, and you can end up with short files
 if you pull it out.

 The reason the "sync" options exist for ext3 is exactly because those file
 systems allow and are expected to cache meta-data writes (for
 performance).

 So, to first order, I don't think we need to do anything right now (except
 to ensure the system doesn't hang if a device is unplugged mid-stream).

 I think there is a separate discussion about whether we should try to deal
 with transactional semantics and the datastore at some future time; but
 not for Trial-2.  This is a feature, and a complex one.

-- 
Ticket URL: <http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/2413#comment:6>
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