Hi Neil! Wow, this is a bit overwhelming for me. However, I got a very specific question for userspace developers in order to probably provide valuable input to the KDE Baloo desktop search developers: NeilBrown - 02.08.21, 06:18:29 CEST: > The "obvious" choice for a replacement is the file handle provided by > name_to_handle_at() (falling back to st_ino if name_to_handle_at isn't > supported by the filesystem). This returns an extensible opaque > byte-array. It is *already* more reliable than st_ino. Comparing > st_ino is only a reliable way to check if two files are the same if > you have both of them open. If you don't, then one of the files > might have been deleted and the inode number reused for the other. A > filehandle contains a generation number which protects against this. > > So I think we need to strongly encourage user-space to start using > name_to_handle_at() whenever there is a need to test if two things are > the same. How could that work for Baloo's use case to see whether a file it encounters is already in its database or whether it is a new file. Would Baloo compare the whole file handle or just certain fields or make a hash of the filehandle or what ever? Could you, in pseudo code or something, describe the approach you'd suggest. I'd then share it on: Bug 438434 - Baloo appears to be indexing twice the number of files than are actually in my home directory https://bugs.kde.org/438434 Best, -- Martin
