Preliminary Suggestion For Atomic Transactions

[Jeff Pitman]

In the past there's been a need to provide consistency between symbolic 
links or repository metadata during a sync.  Currently, rsync renames 
files piecemeal.  The attached patch (extremely ugly) attempts to 
resolve this by foregoing the rename step until the end.  It adds a new 
option (if we didn't, ls might catch up).

There are several issues to get over.  The first big one in running the 
testsuite is that the parent dirs mtime is not getting preserved.  I'll 
need some insight into how this might work.  Next, hardlinks need some 
work.  Finally, there are disk space considerations by leaving all tmp 
files open until the transaction completes.  There might be security 
issues by leaving a larger timing window .. who knows, i'm sure many 
will make comments about this stuff.

I give you .... (drum roll) ... atomic transactions ... (tada).  (Faces 
with perplex looks go here.)

-- 
-jeff
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: atomic.patch
Type: text/x-diff
Size: 10856 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.samba.org/archive/rsync/attachments/20050106/64f3f8bc/atomic.bin