Re: The /. article

Zack Weinberg <zack@codesourcery.com> writes:
> I would point out that it is quite difficult to implement an atomic
> transaction model on top of bare Unix filesystem primitives, and even
> harder on Windows due to the lack of hard links. Use of a database
> gets Subversion atomicity for free.

(Well, this is sort of on-topic, as it may help people learn more
about Subversion...)

The Berkeley atomicity helps, but it didn't give us commit atomicity
completely for free. We still had to do some of the same things in
the db that we would have had to do in the regular filesystem, to
achieve commit atomicity.

I have no idea if it would have been harder or easier to do just using
filesystem primitives. We only had time to do it once. :-) I suspect
that Berkeley helps us support copies/renames more cleanly than we
might otherwise have, but again, that's conjecture.

-K

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Received on Sat Oct 21 14:37:04 2006