list of filesystems with known issues

[Matt Mackall]

On Tue, 2009-03-03 at 17:10 +0100, Jens.Wulf at sew-eurodrive.de wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> every once in a while someone with a corrupted repo pops up on this list. Sometimes it is because he used hg on a filesystem which has issues. 
> Searching the bugtracker, wiki and mailing list didn't reveal that
> much about filesystems which should be avoided, though. Maybe I just
> didn't use the right keywords, but everything I found was 
>   "There are known problems with XFS on Linux, but that's about it."
> 
> Which ones cause problems?

XFS on Linux: some versions lose writes to revlogs (should be fixed in
Linux kernels from the past year or so).

NFS on Linux: some versions have attribute caching bugs that
occasionally cause incorrect output from hg status (again, fixed in
recent kernels).

We don't have a lot of information about Windows filesystem issues. The
most frequent problem here tends to be interference by virus scanners.
The locking and ordering semantics on Windows shares is also possibly
different, which may allow clients to race when writing to the same
repository.

> PS: that reminded me of something similar: it seems that the inotify
> extension is not without problems, but there's no word about it on its
> wiki page.

inotify should definitely be considered experimental.

-- 
http://selenic.com : development and support for Mercurial and Linux