Re: t5400 failure on Windows

Am 16.05.2017 um 00:24 schrieb Jeff King:

   4. There is something racy and unportable about both programs writing
      to the same trace file. It's opened with O_APPEND, which means that
      each write should atomically position the pointer at the end of the
      file. Is it possible there's a problem with that in the way
      O_APPEND works on Windows?

      If that was the case, though, I'd generally expect a sheared write
      or a partial overwrite. The two origin/HEAD lines from the two
      programs are the exact same length, but I'd find it more likely for
      the overwrite to happen with one of the follow-on lines.

Good guesswork! O_APPEND is not atomic on Windows, in particular, it is emulated as lseek(SEEK_END) followed by write().

I ran the test a few more times, and it fails in different ways (different missing lines) and also succeeds in a minority of the cases.

Windows is capable of writing atomically in the way O_APPEND requires (keyword: FILE_APPEND_DATA), but I do not see a way to wedge this into the emulation layer. For the time being, I think I have to skip the test case.

The question remains how endangered our uses of O_APPEND are when the POSIX semantics are not obeyed precisely:

* trace.c: It is about debugging. Not critical.

* sequencer.c: It writes the "done" file. No concurrent accesses are expected: Not critial.

* refs/files-backend.c: There are uses in functions open_or_create_logfile() and log_ref_setup(). Sounds like it is in reflogs. Sounds like this is about reflogs. If there are concurrent accesses, there is a danger that a reflog is not recorded correctly. Then reflogs may be missing and objects may be pruned earlier than expected. That's something to worry about, but I would not count it as mission critical.

-- Hannes