Re: [boost] [afio] Formal review of Boost.AFIO

Subject: Re: [boost] [afio] Formal review of Boost.AFIO
From: Gavin Lambert (gavinl_at_[hidden])
Date: 2015-08-31 19:39:13

On 1/09/2015 04:33, Niall Douglas wrote:
> I would doubt that AFIO will ever be useful for this situation. The
> way in which it will lock byte ranges is incompatible with all other
> Windows programs in order to achieve POSIX byte range locking
> semantics (and therefore compatibility with AFIO's running on NFS or
> CIFS). It is also, deliberately, incompatible with other programs
> doing POSIX byte range locking too in order to prevent unexpected
> interactions.
[...]
> AFIO combined with anything not speaking AFIO is not supported, nor
> will be. You will probably find this unreasonable and not useful, but
> such are the differences between the platforms in file system any
> additional abstraction is not practically useful.

Like others, this troubles me.

Do you mean that when you perform AFIO byte-locking the files will 
appear completely locked to non-AFIO applications?  Or that they will 
appear completely unlocked?  Or that it is unspecified (perhaps 
dependent on file location or platform)?

Either of the last two would be deal-breakers, I think -- the first 
might be tolerable in some cases but could limit usability.