providing files to activities

Albert Cahalan acahalan at gmail.com
Wed Nov 7 11:59:21 EST 2007


I'm hearing that files will be provided to activites as hard links.

This is not good. It prevents atomic update via rename.
Far better is to provide directories, one per file, so that
updates can be made atomic. While you can't hard link a directory,
you can bind mount it. This is essentially the same, with the
extra benefit of not wearing out nand storage.

The command line version:  mount --bind srcdir dstdir

You can even make the mount read-only, avoiding any need to
mess with file permissions to block writes.

Handling groups of files together as a single unit also becomes
possible; it happens that I actually need this. (think OSX forks)



More information about the Devel mailing list