[Info-vax] Re; Spiralog, RMS Journaling (was Re: FREESPADRIFT)

[Johnny Billquist]

On 2016-06-18 11:19, lawrencedo99 at gmail.com wrote:
> On Saturday, June 18, 2016 at 8:56:38 PM UTC+12, Paul Sture wrote:
>
>> Rather useful when determining how much space is required for a
>> Time Machine Backup, I imagine.
>
> Time Machine plays fast and loose with your filesystem integrity (multiple hard links to directories), and you pay the price in reliability <http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?t=1252811>.

Multiple hard links are not a problem for file system integrity. Any 
Unix systems have plenty of hard links to directories all the time.
(Hint: what do you think . and .. is?)

>> cf VMS only storing the block sizes of files rather than the number of
>> bytes; this can be problematic for utilities ported from a system which
>> has an easy/cheap way to supply the exact size in bytes.
>
> This was the example Linus Torvalds gave of why he hated VMS...

It is a problem for programs that actually want size of things in bytes. 
Annoyingly enough, Unix systems often cheat in relation to this and some 
net protocols as well (many network protocols want sizes in bytes, but 
should be using the internet standard for text, which should have CR+LF 
for newlines, meaning the native file size in Unix systems are incorrect 
in this context).

   Johnny