ITP: leafnode

Igor Pechtchanski pechtcha@cs.nyu.edu
Fri Apr 2 19:17:00 GMT 2004


On Fri, 2 Apr 2004, Christopher Faylor wrote:

> On Fri, Apr 02, 2004 at 06:22:53PM +0300, A. Alper ATICI wrote:
> >On Fri, Apr 02, 2004 at 04:17:16PM +0200, Corinna Vinschen wrote:
> >> >
> >> > 1. Leafnode relies on hard-link counts, so current implementation of hlinks
> >> > on FAT32 breaks it. News spool has to be on NTFS, and it seems this will be
> >> > an NT/2K/XP only package.
> >>
> >> Is that necessary?  Can't that be ifdef'd for Cygwin?
> >>
> >
> >I've discussed this before with leafnode maintainer, Matthias Andree, and
> >here's what he says:
> >
> ><quote>
> >The whole /var/spool/news/* organization relies on hard links.
> >
> >The expire process relies on the hard link count (st_nlink in struct
> >stat, as in the <sys/stat.h> header file and returned by the stat()
> >syscall) being correct, file copies on FAT32 will lead to premature expiry
> >and a horrible waste of disk space, it may become unbearable for
> >cross-posted articles.
> ></quote>
>
> Ok, so I vote "no" on this package given the above restriction.
>
> cgf

Umm, why?  Not that I'm voting for it, but as long as the package detects
that it's not running on NTFS and bails out gracefully, it should be fine.
We have other NT-only packages in the distro (e.g., editrights).

OTOH, I don't see this restriction making the package very useful even on
Unix.  I haven't looked at the actual implementation, but unless the
hardlinks are to the files in the same directory, they wouldn't work with
remotely-mounted /var/spool/news, for example, since cross-device
hardlinks are usually not supported.  If there's a way they deal with
non-local /var/spool/news, the same solution could be used for FAT/FAT32.
	Igor
-- 
				http://cs.nyu.edu/~pechtcha/
      |\      _,,,---,,_		pechtcha@cs.nyu.edu
ZZZzz /,`.-'`'    -.  ;-;;,_		igor@watson.ibm.com
     |,4-  ) )-,_. ,\ (  `'-'		Igor Pechtchanski, Ph.D.
    '---''(_/--'  `-'\_) fL	a.k.a JaguaR-R-R-r-r-r-.-.-.  Meow!

"I have since come to realize that being between your mentor and his route
to the bathroom is a major career booster."  -- Patrick Naughton



More information about the Cygwin-apps mailing list