Re: [9fans] 9pfuse and O_APPEND

[erik quanstrom <quanstro@quanstro.net>]

> It is difficult to answer your question without knowing what rewrite
> actually does and how mailboxes are structured. But in an imaginary
> world where a mailbox is a list of constant sized blocks (size<iounit)
> a bunch of simultaneous appends and rewrites of existing blocks
> would work perfectly well.

(your imaginary mailbox sounds like a wormhole that builds a filesystem
inside a file.)

a mailbox, if you recall from unix, is a bunch of messages concatinated
into a file.  each message is framed by a "From " line and a blank line.

obviously, this is not efficient for big mailboxes.  since i support users
with GB+ mailboxes, i implemented a one-file-per message scheme
which doesn't require append semantics, though it does use atomic
open.

- erik