Comment 17 for bug 98836

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Martin Pool (mbp) wrote : Re: [Bug 98836] Re: [MASTER] "OS locks must die" - dirstate file write locks exclude readers and limit portability

Hi John,

I realize it's very frustrating if you hit this, especially if the
problem only occurs with bzr. Determining whether it is a local
configuration problem or a bug specific to one NFS client or server is
necessary but not very helpful to users who are being bitten.
Basically every substantial project I've worked on that does any disk
storage has needed to work around NFS bugs or quirks of one kind or
another, so I really should have known better and vetoed a format that
relied on file locking. I'm sorry I didn't.

If someone puts up a patch that solves this without introducing worse
bugs I will very happily take it. I guess many people may feel it's a
reasonable tradeoff but just taking chances on losing their data seems
like a poor risk.

(On the other hand, since I think we do have a lockdir lock, perhaps
doing without the OS lock won't risk more than a transient error.
I'll have a look at it.)

--
Martin