Bug 577126

Summary:	sys-apps/portage: egencache: always create a new inode (break hardlink) when writing a file
Product:	Portage Development	Reporter:	Zac Medico <zmedico>
Component:	Core	Assignee:	Portage team <dev-portage>
Status:	CONFIRMED ---
Severity:	enhancement	CC:	esigra
Priority:	Normal
Version:	unspecified
Hardware:	All
OS:	All
Whiteboard:
Package list:		Runtime testing required:	---
Bug Depends on:
Bug Blocks:	240187

Description Zac Medico gentoo-dev

2016-03-12 07:43:27 UTC

When writing a file, creating a new inode has some clear advantages:

1) existing files can be replaced atomically with os.rename()
2) leads to copy-on-write behavior with hardlinks, which is useful if someone wants to use hardlinks to create copy-on-write repository snapshots on a filesystem such as ext4 (no need for btrfs or zfs)

Comment 1 Zac Medico gentoo-dev

2016-03-12 18:52:48 UTC

A fix for egencache --write-timestamp is now in the master branch:

https://gitweb.gentoo.org/proj/portage.git/commit/?id=4ec443f2ac57040304107720f24cad6b4651c7a4

We still need to fix --update-use-local-desc and --update-changelogs.