On Wed, Oct 9, 2013 at 1:50 AM, Roland Mainz <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 3, 2013 at 11:17 AM, Roland Mainz <[email protected]> 
> wrote:
> [CC:'ing ast-developers again to get feedback from the people there...]
>> On Thu, Oct 3, 2013 at 2:51 AM, David Korn <[email protected]> wrote:
>>> On Tue, Oct 1, 2013 at 5:52 PM, Roland Mainz <[email protected]>
>>> wrote:
> [snip]
>>> I really think that hole processing should be in sfio.
>>
>> Agreed.
>>
>>> Maybe it needs an
>>> sfopen(), and sfset() option to enable so that it doesn't affect other
>>> commands, but the implementation should be in one spot and sfio is the
>>> logical choice for the spot.
>>
>> Erm... I'll add a new function to handle hole/data copying called
>> |sfcopydata()| for now. Putting it into |sfmove()| turned out to be
>> too risky and IMHO we need a different API.
>
> ping! ... any feedback on this part ? I further crawled over all
> |sfmove()|&&co. consumers... and based on that survey I can say that
> no other consumer than cp(1) will benefit from |SEEK_HOLE|/|SEEK_DATA|
> to copy data for now... therefore I just add |sfcopydata()| as
> function which enumerates the file hole/data layout and then uses
> |sfmove()| (with |SF_WHOLE| set) to copy data and |sfseek()| to skip
> over the holes...
>
> ... is that OK so far ?
>
>> The other thing I'm trying to figure out whether we can somehow move
>> holes via pipes using |putmsg()| (the difference between |write()| and
>> |putmsg()| is that |putmsg()| can preserve the boundaries of a data
>> block) and maybe a special flag which defines whether data are a hole
>> or not).
>
> Erm... any comments on that idea ?

Yes, I have a few comments:
1. If the platform has SEEK_HOLE cp(1) and cohorts must NEVER "invent"
holes out of zero bytes. That causes database corruptions for Oracle's
DB and a lot of the bioinformatics products from NIH. They all provide
their custom scripts (usually C or perl) to copy data or convert them
to a more portable (hole-less) format.
2. cp(1) and cohorts should include an option in --help to detect
whether it supports SEEK_HOLE
3. lsholes name. I saw the proposal with lssparsemap and I think this
is the best naming proposal so far.

Irek
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