Hi,
On Sun, Jul 1, 2012 at 3:00 PM, C. Masloch <c...@bttr-software.de> wrote:
>> Recently there was a thread
>> about concurrent file access in the network - apparently FreeDOS
>> SHARE and kernel support for it are not as good as in MS DOS
>
> ... where this "not as good" support apparently amounts to "may corrupt
> your file system when concurrent write access occurs". This, naturally, is
> expected for MS-DOS-lacking-"SHARE" semantics; with the FreeDOS kernel
> though, there seems to be some missing functionality even with its "SHARE"
> loaded! [I just created and ran a particular test on the latest kernel
> release (build 2041 compiled 2012-02-07) with the latest "SHARE"
> (2005-09-14) loaded and it reproducibly causes clusters to be lost. I
> believe that more serious file system corruption is possible as well.]
>
> Concurrent file (write) access is often incorrectly conflated with
> networking, but can in fact occur even on a single-tasking "single user"
> system that doesn't run anything network-related. (For historical reasons,
> most typical DOS programs try to avoid accessing files in a way that would
> expose such problems, of course.)
I'm not sure if this is a bug, misfeature, lack of testing (re:
FreeDOS specifically vs. arcane dark corners of MS-DOS), or user
error. As good as FreeDOS is, obviously we haven't ever had a big
company kicking the tires. So some minor flaws may persist, but
overall it seems to works very very well.
I'd like to hear what Jeremy or Japheth have to say, esp. as I don't
recall either of them weighing in on this. But others (hi, Tom) seem
more pessimistic about it "ever being fixed". As much as I like
FreeDOS, it does seem unlikely that more will get done unless we get
more volunteers. I'm not too skeptical, but I guess it's more
realistic (defeatist?) to just accept that FreeDOS will always have a
few bugs (like any software). We can't have everything, I guess.
But, to be fair, this is not something that most people need, and only
Marcos seems to have run into this issue. I guess most of us are more
tame in our usage. At least the code posted on BTTR seems to be user
error that nobody in their right mind would willingly write:
fopen("test1","wb") twice in near succession. So I don't lose any
sleep over that!
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