On Tue, Nov 05 2013, Ben Gamari <bgamari.foss@gmail.com> wrote: > Tomi Ollila <tomi.ollila@iki.fi> writes: > >> >> The whole series looks OK to me. The only thing I'm, a bit worried about >> what happens is I Ctrl-C compaction at any state. Is it possible that I >> end up with corrupted database ? Someone may accidentally execute >> notmuch compact -- for example by picking the command from history. >> > You should in principle never end up in a situation where the original > database is corrupted. Xapian's Compactor interface reads from the > existing database and writes out the compacted database to a new > directory. The notmuch compact command keeps the original database in > place until the last possible moment. > > When the compacted database is completely constructed it, deletes or > moves the old database out of the way and then moves the new database > into place. The worst thing that could happen is that you manage to > interrupt the process between deleting the old database and moving the > new one into place (a very small window). In this case you'd simply need > to move the new database into place manually (although you'd need to > figure out where the compacted database is located). Ah true. I failed to keep the whole picture in mind. Indeed the compactor first compacts from .notmuch/xapian to .notmuch/xapian.compact (and finally directory renaming is done in database.cc... (and with directories we cannot do atomic file update using link()/rename() calls). (If we wanted to handle this "small window" we could try use 'xapian.compact' directory in case 'xapian' was nonexistent but... :) That understood I'm ok with these pathes (when that oversight fixed). > > Cheers, > > - Ben Tomi