On Sun, 2007-08-12 at 11:08 +0200, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
Le dimanche 12 août 2007 à 05:02 +0200, Ralf Corsepius a écrit :
And how do you "fix" the "find"-based cron job users might have implemented to clean up /var/cache from files not being used for time span "x"?
Ralf,
Everyone can find pathological cases
Well, what you call pathological cases, I call "generalization".
That said, I consider notime to lack generality, because it violates standards (POSIX), breaks applications and disables a feature of the OS.
atime killed one of my flash cards before I learnt to disable it by default (nowadays the system is supposed to detect flash and disable atime, no idea how foolproof the check is)
May-be notime should be made the default on flash drives?
atime is a legacy ass-backwards default That no one dared touching it so far does not make it less stupid We're making more user-impacting changes with less cause every release
Let's just disable atime asap so more testers check it before F8, and forget about it
As I already said many times before. It's trivial to implement "atime-based find" scripts:
You'll hardly find any in a default installation, because they hardly make much sense as part of a distro (exept. tmpwatch), but they make a lot of sense as part of individual installation.
E.g. * A cron job removing files not having been accessed for more than a month in /var/cache/yum. * Users wanting to remove "sound/data/image" files they have not listened/read/looked at for time xxx inside of their /home ...
Similar stuff also can easily be integrated into applications. When abandoning atime you'd break these applications and would force future applications to administrate time-stamps as part of the application instead of them being able to utilize the OSes resources.
Let's just disable atime asap so more testers check it before F8, and forget about it
IMO, atime should be the default. Instead, users should learn to use partitions (instead of lumping together everything into one partition and to apply individual mount-flags to them, for those people thinking notime is helpful to them - I don't find noatime helpful.
Ralf