Elektrified X.org released (was: X configuration paradigm, and a proposal)

[Neal D. Becker]

Sean Middleditch wrote:

> On Tue, 2004-11-30 at 14:24 -0500, Neal D. Becker wrote:
>> Sean Middleditch wrote:
>> 
>> [...]
>> > So far as implementation, this really is easy even with a (single)
>> > file-
>> > based backend.  Robustness might take some work, but the basics are
>> > easy.  You simply keep a list of all they keys that have been set, and
>> > when the Commit command comes along, lock the file(s) in question and
>> > modify them.  On Rollback, just "forget" all the key changes that
>> > haven't been committed yet.  Basically the hard part for the simple
>> > file backend is getting the commit to stay atomic on errors when you
>> > use
>> > multiple files.  If you have multiple files being changed, I don't
>> > believe it's actually possible to be 100% atomic - you can reduce the
>> > chances of something breaking, but there will always be various race
>> > conditions in regards to when errors occur that could leave you in a
>> > half-committed state.
>> > 
>> 
>> rename is atomic.  You can always use this fact if you need to.
> 
> Yes.  That doesn't help with the problem of making atomic commits to
> *multiple* files.  You would have to perform multiple renames, of which
> some may succeed and others may fail for any of a number of reasons, and
> then you can't necessarily undo the ones you already did.  Unless there
> is a way to do an atomic rename of multiple files, my point definitely
> still stands - multiple files cannot be modified atomically.
> 
>> 

Are you sure?  What if you:
1) duplicate the directory (using hardlinks to files)
2) atomic rename directory