Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Re: tla on nfs only

[Aaron Bentley]

Stefan Monnier wrote:

> > Finally, this is a Free Software project, and part of that freedom is the
> > ability to control how your tools work.  The change in question is not
> > difficult to make.  Lobbying volunteers to make the changes you want doesn't
> > seem a very nice way to operate.
> >    
>
> Well, it's not quite the same:
> - I can't proselytise the same way if I have to tell people "oh don't use
>  the official version but use mine instead".
>  
My suggestion is "write it first, then get it included".   It's quite 
conceivable that checking revlibs for corruption could become optional, 
but it's not going to until someone who cares does the work.  And that 
someone is not me.  It seems to be you. 

Now that you know where to disable the checks, you need to implement a 
way of making it configurable.  I'd suggest a =nocheck file in the 
revlib directory, and an extra option "--no-checks" for 
"library-config".  That way, if you have some libraries on NFS and 
others locally, you can disable checking for the NFS revlibs only.  
Probably be a good idea to mount that NFS partition read-only, too.

> - When writing support code (like an Emacs front-end), I can't assume that
>  people will use my hacked version.
>
> NFS is a reality at many places (Samba at others, tho I'm not sure it's
> much better in this respect), tla needs to deal with it IMO.
>  
NFS is a reality at my workplace too, it's just that we don't use it for 
storing home directories.
tla falls down only when users are denied reasonable access to local 
storage.  It does a great job with *archives* in NFS.

> I think the core of the problem is that too many files of the revlib are
> checked every time.  If tla were more careful to only check the files it
> actually looks at, then it would have much more freedom to use other kinds
> of checks that don't depend on inode or device numbers.
>  
See my last email.  In order to know which files changed, we must check 
all of them.

Aaron