simplicity vs safety with complexity

[Tom Anderson]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Jef Poskanzer" <jef at acme.com>
To: <bogofilter at bogofilter.org>
Sent: Wednesday, January 26, 2005 12:17 PM
Subject: Re: simplicity vs safety with complexity


>>> It cannot be 100% as simple.
>>
>>I don't see why not.  Transactions should be transparent to the user.
>
> Well, they do require the user to know about them during a recovery.
> Otherwise I agree.

Right, but we have recovery procedures for the non-transactional version 
too.  Therefore, the transactional version should be capable of being 100% 
as simple as the non-transactional version.  The recovery will simply be 
more effective and reliable.  It seems like the reason why it is complicated 
is because of BerkeleyDB, but then again, I don't actually know how 
complicated it is since I haven't attempted to use it yet.  If backing up or 
copying wordlist.db is simply changed to backing up or copying the whole 
directory rather than just a file, that doesn't seem like such a big deal. 
Nonetheless, would it be possible to store the transaction logs inside of 
wordlist.db???  Then presumably, it would be more similar to the 
non-transactional version?

Tom