Subject: Re: bug#18316: [PATCH] warn on too large file copies

From: Eric Blake <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 22 Aug 2014 13:38:04 -0600

On 08/22/2014 12:09 PM, Paul Eggert wrote:
> Adam wrote:
>> I know it's a rare scenario
> 
> The next time you copy a file containing 19 exabytes let us know.  :-)

By the way, even at a lightning-fast rate of a gigabyte a second, such a
copy wouldn't complete in your lifetime.

> 
> If we're going to fix this, I suggest removing the limit entirely;
> that's better than generating a warning if the limit is gone past.  I
> expect there are plenty of places in the code that stop working after
> 2**63 bytes, and I'd focus on them first.

The size of 2**63 is so huge that it is as good as unlimited, for
anything we can do in a finite lifetime, and we don't have to bend over
backwards trying to treat it as an artificial limitation.

-- 
Eric Blake   eblake redhat com    +1-919-301-3266
Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org