[Python-Dev] Ext4 data loss

[Guido van Rossum]

On Tue, Mar 10, 2009 at 1:46 PM, Neil Hodgson <nyamatongwe at gmail.com> wrote:
>   The technique advocated by Theodore Ts'o (save to temporary then
> rename) discards metadata. What would be useful is a simple, generic
> way in Python to copy all the appropriate metadata (ownership, ACLs,
> ...) to another file so the temporary-and-rename technique could be
> used.
>
>   On Windows, there is a hack in the file system that tries to track
> the use of temporary-and-rename and reapply ACLs and on OS X there is
> a function FSPathReplaceObject but I don't know how to do this
> correctly on Linux.

I don't know how to implement this for metadata beyond the traditional
stat metadata, but the API could be an extension of shutil.copystat().

-- 
--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)