I appears from the announcements on the coreutils web site that the 8.10/8.11 releases may cause data loss.
http://savannah.gnu.org/forum/forum.php?forum_id=6785 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.11 (2011-04-13) [stable] ... cp -a --link would not create a hardlink to a symlink, instead copying the symlink and then not preserving its timestamp. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0] cp now avoids FIEMAP issues with BTRFS before Linux 2.6.38, which could result in corrupt copies of sparse files. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10] ... ** Changes in behavior cp now avoids syncing files when possible, when doing a FIEMAP copy. The sync is only needed on Linux kernels before 2.6.39. [The sync was introduced in coreutils-8.10] cp now copies empty extents efficiently, when doing a FIEMAP copy. It no longer reads the zero bytes from the input, and also can efficiently create a hole in the output file when --sparse=always is specified. http://savannah.gnu.org/forum/forum.php?forum_id=6798 This is to announce coreutils-8.12, a stable release. We released coreutils-8.11 less than two weeks ago. Why a new release so soon? Because under unusual conditions, coreutils-8.11's copying code could cause trouble. Data loss trouble. The trouble could arise only when these conditions are all met: - when using linux-2.6.39-related kernels (including at least -rc3) and - using an xfs file system and - copying (via cp, install, mv) a file with a so-called "unwritten extent" shortly after it has been created, yet before some data in that unwritten extent has made it to disk. This would happen if you're using the "gold" linker, which preallocates using fallocate and then writes its output (the binaries) into those unwritten extents, and you then immediately copy those binaries into place via "make install". Under those conditions, just building coreutils and running "make install" quickly enough after compile and link would result in installing files containing all 0 bytes. So either we should regress to a version earlier than what we have or hope that 8.12 really fixes all of the outstanding data loss issues. Jack ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Magic Quadrant for Content-Aware Data Loss Prevention Research study explores the data loss prevention market. Includes in-depth analysis on the changes within the DLP market, and the criteria used to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of these DLP solutions. http://www.accelacomm.com/jaw/sfnl/114/51385063/ _______________________________________________ Fink-devel mailing list Fink-devel@lists.sourceforge.net List archive: http://news.gmane.org/gmane.os.apple.fink.devel Subscription management: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/fink-devel
