Am 16.05.2017 um 00:24 schrieb Jeff King:
4. There is something racy and unportable about both programs writing
to the same trace file. It's opened with O_APPEND, which means that
each write should atomically position the pointer at the end of the
file. Is it possible there's a problem with that in the way
O_APPEND works on Windows?
If that was the case, though, I'd generally expect a sheared write
or a partial overwrite. The two origin/HEAD lines from the two
programs are the exact same length, but I'd find it more likely for
the overwrite to happen with one of the follow-on lines.
Good guesswork! O_APPEND is not atomic on Windows, in particular, it is
emulated as lseek(SEEK_END) followed by write().
I ran the test a few more times, and it fails in different ways
(different missing lines) and also succeeds in a minority of the cases.
Windows is capable of writing atomically in the way O_APPEND requires
(keyword: FILE_APPEND_DATA), but I do not see a way to wedge this into
the emulation layer. For the time being, I think I have to skip the test
case.
The question remains how endangered our uses of O_APPEND are when the
POSIX semantics are not obeyed precisely:
* trace.c: It is about debugging. Not critical.
* sequencer.c: It writes the "done" file. No concurrent accesses are
expected: Not critial.
* refs/files-backend.c: There are uses in functions
open_or_create_logfile() and log_ref_setup(). Sounds like it is in
reflogs. Sounds like this is about reflogs. If there are concurrent
accesses, there is a danger that a reflog is not recorded correctly.
Then reflogs may be missing and objects may be pruned earlier than
expected. That's something to worry about, but I would not count it as
mission critical.
-- Hannes