Re: New packages and cross-config.gnu

[tb@MIT.EDU (Thomas Bushnell, BSG)]

Roland McGrath <roland@frob.com> writes:

> Actually it's not fully backward compatible.  As I was just reminded, the
> libc `sync' function, which is what the fileutils sync uses (sync is in
> fileutils, not sh-utils), is backward-compatible and thus not synchronous
> (it passes a zero wait flag in file_syncfs).  

Hmm.  Hurd sync should use the libc sync function too; it should not
set the wait flag.  If it does, that's a bug.  The default should be
nowait, with an option (--synchronous comes to mind) to request
synchronous sync.

I'd rather GNU be a nice system, than try and separate out naturally
joined functionality.  sync, on GNU, should be responsible for sync,
in all its various flavors.  On linux only one kind of sync is
possible, but that's not important to us; fileutils sync is GNU sync,
not just Unix sync, and we should not hesitate to have it do better
and more clever stuff on the Hurd.

I think having a more generic syncfs libc function as you describe is
a good idea; then fileutils could use that in a suitably generic
fashion.

Thomas