[squeak-dev] Adding fsync() call to the primitiveFileFlush prim ?

John Pfersich smalltalker2 at mac.com
Sun May 22 05:36:38 UTC 2016




Sent from my iPad
> On May 21, 2016, at 22:07, David T. Lewis <lewis at mail.msen.com> wrote:
> 
>> On Sat, May 21, 2016 at 10:49:24AM -0700, tim Rowledge wrote:
>> The issue here is that the PI - especially when used in schools - is storing everything on a micro-SD card. Being surrounded by kids is a scary thing for a computer. They don???t necessarily bother to do a nice system shutdown or even exit Scratch before yanking the power. Teachers don???t necessarily know to tell them to; lots of people doing their best with insufficient knowledge.
> 
> D'oh, now I get it. I was not thinking of the case of yanking the power cord.
> I can well imagine that this might be a bit disruptive for normal process exit
> cleanups that are supposed to ensure that fflushed buffers actually make it
> to the disk-like media.
> 
>> An interesting thing is that I ???remembered??? that we flush files when closing them but in fact we don???t.
> 
> In a perfect world you do not need to flush a file when closing it, because
> closing it implies a flush (e.g. fclose performs an fflush). That said,
> yanking the power cord might introduce some imperfections.
> 
> Dave
> 
> 
And I don't think that people that yank the power cord should be catered to. If you do stupid things, you should pay the consequences. A computer isn't a toaster. And teachers should convey that to their students. 


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