|
From: | Assaf Gordon |
Subject: | Re: [bug #46481] install-info can "corrupt" dir file if interrupted. |
Date: | Fri, 20 Nov 2015 19:47:12 -0500 |
User-agent: | Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:38.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/38.3.0 |
Hello, Regarding a 'safer' way to replace files during installation: On 11/20/2015 06:22 PM, Gavin Smith wrote:
On 20 November 2015 at 22:53, Karl Berry <address@hidden> wrote:3) all that said, writing to a temp file and renaming is at least viable, although rather a pain and susceptible to many hard-to-pin-down bugsThat's my worry too. How do we know that there's not some other way to make it fail by abusing the program? What if you turn the power off to your computer as the operating system is renaming the file? And so on.
Eric Blake (CC'd) recently mentioned on the GNU coreutils mailing list the 'renameat2' syscall and was looking for possible use-cases of its new atomic file-swap ability: http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/coreutils/2015-11/msg00068.html This could be such a case: install everything to a temp location, then atomically swap the temp/real files, then (if the swap succeeded), delete the (now old) temp files. just a thought... - assaf
[Prev in Thread] | Current Thread | [Next in Thread] |