bug#22768: Crash safety

[Antonio Diaz Diaz]

Paul Eggert wrote:
> Why -y?  And why a short name at all?  I don't expect this to be 
> something that people will want to type by hand.

Because ddrescue already provides the option '-y, --synchronous' for a 
somewhat similar functionality. (It is in my first message). I find 
short option names handy, but I have no problem implementing this as 
long-only.


> Come to think of it, gzip should also do an fsync, or at least an 
> fdatasync, on the destination's directory before removing the source. 

Doing it right in all circumstances may be impossible. Also fsync may be 
a no-op in some systems and very expensive in others. And some systems 
are safe without the need of fsync. This is why my first idea was to 
leave the safety to the system by default and add an option to enable 
the "maybe safer but slower" behavior.


> And this suggests that any long option name shouldn't be something 
> syscall-specific like '--no-fsync', but should instead be something more 
> general and easy to remember, e.g., '--hasty'.

I had to search 'hasty' in the dictionary, so I think it is perhaps not 
so good and easy to remember for non-English speakers. OTOH, many people 
using a CLI know what 'fsync' or 'sync' mean.

Just now my preference is to make the behavior optional and call the 
option --fsync. I think both points meet the principle of least surprise.


Best regards,
Antonio.