Re: [Apt-proxy-users] endless recycling

[Jonathan K. <jk...@cs...>]

On Tue, 1 Feb 2005, Micha wrote:

> Why noatime mounts ? I guess (but i don't really know) as a try to 
> accelerate the access time. But do you really think on a modern HD this 
> could be a bottleneck, even when serving 50 machines ? So why not make 
> atime mandatory, and suggest the standard atime mount at installation 
> time, and there could affitionally be a check if no atomes can be found, 
> and an appropriate error message.

Sysadmins have their reasons for doing things like this.  It doesn't 
matter if actually makes sense to someone else or not.  People really get 
mad when some package says, "Oh, by the way.  You need to change how 
you're doing your job."  I think it's better ap just supports the users' 
whims without question.

[stuff about ditching atime in favor of mtime with touching to indicate 
last access]

It's an interesting idea.  I do like how it gets away from replicating 
fs stuff.  Apt and the like rely on version numbers rather than mtimes, so 
that's not a problem.  The main problem I see would be with backup 
scripts.  They rely on mtime almost exclusively.  By changing the mtime 
whenever a file is downloaded would cause that file to backed up even 
though it hasn't been changed.  For a large and well utilized cache, that 
could result in lots gigs needless being backuped daily.  That's not a 
good situation either.

Basically, I think the db is an okay solution to a problem where there 
aren't any really good solutions.

--
Jonathan Koren			World domination?  I'll leave that to the 
jk...@cs...		religious nuts and Republicans, thank you.
http://www.cs.siu.edu/~jkoren/		-- The Monarch, "Venture Brothers"