Re: [9fans] Survey: Current Fossil+venti Filesystem

[smiley@zenzebra.mv.com]

Jack Norton <jack@0x6a.com> writes:

> I'd like to know some recent real world experiences with
> fossil+venti. This stems from rumors that for some people, fossil has
> a history of data loss.  I don't like rumors (or data loss), and I'm

Maybe newbies tend to bang on the edges of fossil more than the old
hats, but I've encountered a couple of problems with fossil+venti.

(1) A fresh fossil+venti install on a ThinkPad T23 resulted in a file
system with read errors.  (Discussed in a previous thread on this list.)
On the other hand, a fossil-only install on the same machine worked
fine.  This was resolved by using a 9atom kernel and enabling DMA in
plan9.ini.

(2) I once experienced something really bizarre, whereby doing something
like a cp/dircp over a file resulted in corruption of the backed up
copy.  If I recall correctly, the snap/archive (don't remember which)
copy of the file thereafter contained zero bytes, even though both the
previous and new versions of the file were non-zero in length.  This is
probably a problem with how fossil+venti handle file truncation.  I
learned to tiptoe around that by using rm before cp/dircp.

Other than those, I've never lost data with fossil+venti... at least in
the whole three months or so this noob's been using them.  :) YMMV.

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