Re: Fwd: Re: A new look at old NFS readdir() problems?

Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>

From: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
To: Larry Rosenman <ler@lerctr.org>
Cc: Pgsql hackers <pgsql-hackers@lists.postgresql.org>, Thomas Munro <tmunro@freebsd.org>
Date: 2025-01-02T20:48:53Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers
Larry Rosenman <ler@lerctr.org> writes:
> @Tom Lane: This is what Rick Macklem (NFS dev on FreeBSD) has to say on 
> my issue.

Thanks for reaching out to him.  So if I'm reading this correctly,
there's little point in filing a FreeBSD bug because it'll be
dismissed as unfixable.

This leaves us in rather a nasty position.  Sure, we could rewrite
rmtree() as Thomas suggested upthread, but I'm still of the opinion
that that's smearing lipstick on a pig.  rmtree() is the least of
our worries: it doesn't need to expect that anybody else will be
modifying the target directory, plus it can easily restart its scan
without complicated bookkeeping.  I doubt we can make such an
assumption for all our uses of readdir(), or that it's okay to
miss or double-process files in every one of them.

I'm still of the opinion that the best thing to do is disclaim
safety of storing a database on NFS.

			regards, tom lane