[GTALUG] Interesting essay on filesystem consistency

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Sun, Dec 13, 2015 at 10:48:09PM -0500, Christopher Browne wrote:
> http://danluu.com/file-consistency/
> 
> I found it interesting that ReiserFS was pointed at as having amongst the
> best handling of errors, passing them back sensibly to applications.

It better have good error handling given how many insane errors it often
generates (in my experience).  It is not a place I want to store my
data anymore.

> Also interesting was that they pointed at using SQLite as a way of mostly
> hiding applications from worrying about such troubles.
> 
> Also entertaining was the notion of "MBox considered harmful"; makes me
> like MH and Maildir all the better, as they have the merit of storing a
> message per file, so that there's fewer concurrency issues surrounding
> re-opening files and rewriting them.  (Possibly I'm wrong, and the problem
> just shifts to directory metadata access...)

Well deleting a message requires deleting a file, not rewriting the
entire mbox after that message, so Maildir is a good idea.

-- 
Len Sorensen