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Agreed. However, there is some kind of a point here, which is that applications shouldn't be forced to deal with all kinds of error-prone methods. For instance
by jeffdavis 15y ago
Agreed.
However, there is some kind of a point here, which is that applications shouldn't be forced to deal with all kinds of error-prone methods. For instance, I think that filesystems are more low-level than most applications should have to deal with, and the hierarchical structure more often represents some arbitrary imposition than a useful organizational technique. It's 2011, and linux still doesn't offer a stable filesystem with snapshotting/versioning, CRCs, atomic operations, etc. Soon btrfs may be here, but it will be years before it's widespread enough for application developers to count on it, and the basic posix APIs won't make it easy to actually make use of these things.
- lloeki 15y agoI bet ZFS would already be there if not for license compatibility issues.
- jeffdavis 15y agoThat doesn't change the situation. Right now, writing applications is harder to get right, because the basic storage mechanism is a filesystem that forces a hierarchy upon you and provides only the most rudimentary safety guarantees (no ACID, no snapshots, etc.). It happens that Solaris, FreeBSD, OSX, and windows (yes, windows) have taken a good, strong step forward to address this issue. Unfortunately, linux is behind. I say that mainly to show priorities -- one would think that any feature that fundamentally makes applications easier to write would be the top priority of an OS.