Michael Stowe wrote at about 14:56:38 -0500 on Monday, August 31, 2009:
 > 
 > > I don't see why everything needs to worship at the alter of atomic
 > > operations. There are other ways to ensure that things don't go wrong.
 > 
 > There probably isn't, frankly.  And is there a better way of ensuring
 > synchrony?
 > 
 > > Again, it would be helpful to know some specific use cases that you
 > > are concerned about then we can think about potential "locking"
 > > mechanisms or checks to make sure that nothing breaks.
 > 
 > Were you being ironic, or did you answer your own question?
The world is not atomic -- sometimes you sacrifice atomicity for
functionality. Why don't you try running your computer environment
with only purely atomic functions and programs?

 > Atomic operations ensures that nobody has to come up with all the possible
 > ways that two disparate systems can drift apart.  Keeping a database in
 > sync with a filesystem?  Frankly, there are hundreds of things that can go
 > wrong.

But reading/writing the attrib files are not atomic and things can go
wrong there too. There are other aspects of BackupPC that are
non-atomic and have required a combination of careful coding and
sequencing. It is not clear to me that adding a formal and
well-defined database to replace the existing informal and not
well-defined attrib databases would be any different.

If there are hundreds of things that can go wrong, please list the
dozen that come first to mind...

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