On Aug 19, 2011, at 05:25, Kris Buelens wrote: > Yes, that would seem better. But, I no longer have the email(s?) I > exchanged with you when I discovered this problem many years ago. I think > to remember that your reply was: "the STATE stage should not issue a Commit > and commit everything". And, that's right indeed. Maybe my question was > unclear/misleading. > > So indeed, if you'd change STATE to use its own workunit, fewer people would > get the surprises of the current behaviour. > A sticky question. There are strong arguments to be made on both sides:
o The Heisenberg Principle shouldn't apply here. It should be possible to make an observation of the state of a system without affecting the quantity being observed. John Hartmann appears to favor this position. Or: o If a programmer queries the state of a file, it's reasonable that the result of that query will be used subsequently. No process in another workunit, even from another VM, should be allowed to alter that state in the interim. -- gil
