> The fact that you left out the part of the sentence that says "The fsync() function is intended to..." suggests that you may be intentionally hiding this fact

> The fact that you left out the part of the sentence that says "The fsync() function is intended to..." suggests that you may be intentionally hiding this fact to support your point. No, that was not my intention. I just started the sentence "the job of fsync() is" and then went and looked for the portion of the quote that fit. I don't see a semantic difference, but I edited that back in, since you think I'm pulling a fast one on you. > You're quoting a sentence fragment of a non-normative section of the spec, in other words you're half quoting a part of the spec that is not intended to be interpreted formally, literally, or even required to be adhered to. The rationale section of the POSIX spec is strictly informative. Would be nice if you could include which part of the standard claims the rationale is non-normative. Moreover, the justifications against it are themselves based on "history" rather than anything in the text, so even if we assume it's non-normative, you can't really use this as an excuse to dismiss it as if it's somehow less valid than arbitrary tidbits from history. At that point you could try to agree that the (purportedly) non-normative text in fact does contradict the current behavior, but argue that you should have the latitude to ignore it. That's quite a bit different from denying its meaning in the first place. > "The fsync() function shall request that all data for the open file descriptor named by fildes is to be transferred to the storage device associated with the file described by fildes. The nature of the transfer is implementation-defined." The "nature of the transfer" is implementation-defined, yes. They don't care if you do it all at once, in parallel or sequentially, in bursts or uniformly, by boat or by rocket, or whatever. The question of which data is to be transferred is completely unrelated to that. If I say "please take my family to the airport, the nature of the transportation is up to you", you don't get to leave half my family behind and then justify it by claiming I left the choice of family members up to you. I did not leave that up to you. I just said you can choose the nature of the transport. Not the whether or whom of the transport! > It would be unwise to dismiss the wealth of resources that have been provided to you in other comments to better understand this issue, all of them quite extensive and written by experts on this subject, just because of an informal section of the standard If experts claimed the standard was clear but perhaps inconsistent or self-contradictory, that would be very different than what's going on right now. Or if they argued "we agree this behavior is actually inconsistent with the rationale, but we don't believe the rationale is normative", then that would also be a different scenario. But when people are just saying the standard says something other than what it actually says, what am I supposed to do? Agree with them because they're "experts", despite the fact that the standard says the opposite in plain English?