On Tue, 2004-11-30 at 14:24 -0500, Neal D. Becker wrote:
Sean Middleditch wrote:
[...]
> So far as implementation, this really is easy even with a (single) file-
> based backend. Robustness might take some work, but the basics are
> easy. You simply keep a list of all they keys that have been set, and
> when the Commit command comes along, lock the file(s) in question and
> modify them. On Rollback, just "forget" all the key changes that
> haven't been committed yet. Basically the hard part for the simple file
> backend is getting the commit to stay atomic on errors when you use
> multiple files. If you have multiple files being changed, I don't
> believe it's actually possible to be 100% atomic - you can reduce the
> chances of something breaking, but there will always be various race
> conditions in regards to when errors occur that could leave you in a
> half-committed state.
rename is atomic. You can always use this fact if you need to.
Yes. That doesn't help with the problem of making atomic commits to
*multiple* files. You would have to perform multiple renames, of which
some may succeed and others may fail for any of a number of reasons, and
then you can't necessarily undo the ones you already did. Unless there
is a way to do an atomic rename of multiple files, my point definitely
still stands - multiple files cannot be modified atomically.
--
Sean Middleditch <elanthis(a)awesomeplay.com>
AwesomePlay Productions, Inc.