I'm asking for a review of the patch to gdbm at http://sourceforge.net/patch/?func=detailpatch&patch_id=102638&group_id=5470 I asked the author for clarification and this is what I got. Can anybody suggest what to do? His mail doesn't give me much confidence in the patch. :-( --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/) ------- Forwarded Message Date: Tue, 12 Dec 2000 13:24:13 +0100 From: Damjan <arhiv@freemail.org.mk> To: Guido van Rossum <guido@python.org> Subject: Re: your gdbm patch for Python On Mon, Dec 11, 2000 at 03:51:03PM -0500, Guido van Rossum wrote:

I'm looking at your patch at SourceForge:

First, I'm sorry it was such a mess of a patch, but I could't figure it out how to send a more elaborate comment. (But then again, I would't have an email from Guido van Rossum in my mail-box, to show of my friends :)

and wondering two things:

(1) what does the patch do?

(2) why does the patch remove the 'f' / GDBM_FAST option?

From the gdbm info page: ...The following may also be logically or'd into the database flags: GDBM_SYNC, which causes all database operations to be synchronized to the disk, and GDBM_NOLOCK, which prevents the library from performing any locking on the database file. The option GDBM_FAST is now obsolete, since `gdbm' defaults to no-sync mode... ^^^^^^^^ (1) My patch adds two options to the gdbm.open(..) function. These are 'u' for GDBM_NOLOCK, and 's' for GDBM_SYNC. (2) GDBM_FAST is obsolete because gdbm defaults to GDBM_FAST, so it's removed. I'm also thinking about adding a lock and unlock methods to the gdbm object, but it seems that a gdbm database can only be locked and not unlocked. - -- Damjan Georgievski | Дамјан Георгиевски Skopje, Macedonia | Скопје, Македонија ------- End of Forwarded Message