Mike, if inotify will not actually report all changes on an overlayfs
then inotify needs to report an error when someone tries to monitor
changes in an overlayfs.  Pretty simple, eh?

I mean, you could actually fix it so that inotify DOES report all the
changes, but that would be harder than merely erroring out and forcing
the userspace program to fall back to polling.

(I don't know how many userspace programs, besides "tail", know how to
fall back to polling.  But what's the point of having inotify at all, if
userspace programs can't depend on it to either produce correct results,
or give an error when it can't?)

(I reported bug#977847 in which "apt-get install nfs-common" fails on
the latest Ubuntu Beta2 LTS livecd because a critical system facility
made the stupid mistake of depending on inotify.  Either we have to tell
every programmer to pretend inotify doesn't exist as a kernel facility,
or we have to fix it.  This is not an academic concern; end-users are
noticing daily.)

-- 
You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu
Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/882147

Title:
  overlayfs does not implement inotify interfaces correctly

To manage notifications about this bug go to:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/882147/+subscriptions

-- 
ubuntu-bugs mailing list
ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com
https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs

Reply via email to