From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-ID: <89e99b810d2817476d32357364799ce4@quanstro.net> From: erik quanstrom Date: Fri, 19 Dec 2008 15:22:40 -0500 To: 9fans@9fans.net In-Reply-To: <998EB623-CFD3-4E15-BD85-D2111D8A896B@sun.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Subject: Re: [9fans] 9pfuse and O_APPEND Topicbox-Message-UUID: 6a9ddffe-ead4-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025 > 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 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