Re: [Gnu-arch-users] in-tree pristines fatally wounded (merge-fest etc)

[Tom Lord]

    > From: "Stephen J. Turnbull" <address@hidden>

    > >>>>> "Tom" == Tom Lord <address@hidden> writes:

    >     Tom> If you use hard-link trees, but somehow screw up in a way
    >     Tom> that corrupts your library, this will be detected and abort
    >     Tom> the relevent operation (modulo bugs or extremely improbable
    >     Tom> screw-ups :-).

    > Way cool!

    > I gather from the later discussion in your post that library corruption
    > is detected via the "inode hack".  Is that understanding correct?  Are
    > there other tests applied?


Correct, I think.

Whenever tla needs a library revision, it does a quick inventory of
that revision and compares the inode data on the disk to the inode
data recorded when the revision was created.  If they differ, tla
aborts.   Mostly this is to catch cases where you made a project tree
(aka "working directory") with hardlinks to the library, and then
modified a file without breaking the link.

It doesn't do anything like read every file and verify a checksum for
obvious performance reasons.   That's the kind of functionality that
in a mission-critical context you'd want to write a 30-line shell
script cron job for.

-t