Subject: Re: bug#22768: Crash safety

From: Bob Proulx <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 26 Feb 2016 17:46:58 -0700

Antonio Diaz Diaz wrote:
> Paul Eggert wrote:
> >And this suggests that any long option name shouldn't be something
> >syscall-specific like '--no-fsync', but should instead be something more
> >general and easy to remember, e.g., '--hasty'.
> 
> I had to search 'hasty' in the dictionary, so I think it is perhaps not so
> good and easy to remember for non-English speakers. OTOH, many people using
> a CLI know what 'fsync' or 'sync' mean.

Worse is that one program chooses "hasty".  Another chooses "quick".
Another "hurried", "fast", "rapid", "swift".  It becomes impossible to
remember what each program uses.  Keeping to what it does seems least
surprising and in this case it is either --fsync or --sync.

> Just now my preference is to make the behavior optional and call the option
> --fsync. I think both points meet the principle of least surprise.

I would much prefer the above of an option to enable it rather than
one to disable it.  Otherwise I have to go through workarounds to
avoid it in order to have the performance that used to be the default.

It has been many decades with the cached behavior and apparently
without significant issues due to it.  Large changes should be made
slowly as an option rather than abruptly as the default.

Bob