correct!

.. and started the trend, might I (heh-hem) modestly add.

There is no doubt when you're at The Towers that the team appreciates these little gestures of generosity. The first time I treated them, they called me up from the pub and all shouted "Thanks,Rob!"

Wonderful, generous blokes, and it is a genuine priviledge/pleasure to have an association with them. Cheers!

What meet? Did I miss something?

Actually, no-one who attended the meet had access to the software that Rob brought with him. It was a special build for the meet.

Some people drove across several borders, (e.g. Michal 1,200 km, and Mike Tempsch came from Sweden), with many coming from Germany, France, England, Scotland, Belgium. There were only a few who were in "Just the right place at the right time" - in fact, I'd be tempted to say that I, as the organiser, who knew what was coming in advance, was the only one. The rest made the effort to come. Everyone was warned the event was on, and as soon as I knew something special was happening, I posted it on the board. In the week between me posting that and the event, I had 3 more people sign on for the event.

I will confess that I am pretty annoyed with the unreasonable grumpiness of your posting. You had the opportunity to come, you didn't. I arranged special events for the participants to make sure they had a good time when they came here - you didn't come, so why should you feel a need to moan?

The reason you may have to wait months for the Beta of this software is:

- not all the alpha bugs have been reported
- the empeg team are busy with their paid duties which come first
- Rob is being understandably cautious (in your favour) to ensure that you don't loose the contents of your disks, say, due to some unprecedented bug which has not appeared before now. And yes, before you ask, the alpha team has seen this happen in the past. Would you prefer that a copy of this is given out to an uncontrolled distribution group? I am willing to bet that in the event you got bitten, you would be one of the first to jump up and scream publically about "c*** software"!

Finally, I regard your post here as "Rude", too, matey. The work done on this software is done without pay, in personal time, by a group of people who basically like doing this. If earning a crust for some reason gets in the way, who are you to complain about "delays"?

At least as far as Volvo goes, it's been 2004 for at least a month now.

Pants. I'll go back to sleep now.

I think he's just angry because he's not used to it. Normally all the new releases, be it hardware or software are almost ALWAYS released first it the US. Us Europeans sometimes need to wait MONTHS before we can get our hands on the stuff too. Sometimes we even NEVER get a chance to buy it in Europe even if it was developed here (like with the Rio central).

So now, for once, it's the other way around. (About bloody time! ) Even if it's only an Alpha release.

Live with it Matthew, I've experienced this at least a dozen times before.

Rob is being understandably cautious (in your favour) to ensure that you don't loose the contents of your disks, say

Hijack the unlink system call and refuse to unlink anything that isn't the database, unless (mumble, say, something echoed into a file in /proc)

Of course it wouldn't help if the problem were instead writing garbage into the files.

Finally, I regard your post here as "Rude", too, matey.

I know this wasn't in reply to me, but if I get rude, please smack me down. I'm serious.

What you SHOULD be complaining about is the extraordinary quantity of beer and meat products that you missed out on!

I'm sure admitting it will be cause to never get an alpha under any circumstance, but I'm not much for beer, or anything else with alcohol. Occasionally, but not often, and not much.

I'm sure admitting it will be cause to never get an alpha under any circumstance, but I'm not much for beer, or anything else with alcohol. Occasionally, but not often, and not much

Nah. I'm not much into beer also and I even managed to have fun at the meet without it! I also DID get an Alpha release !

Hugo doesn't like beer also, so I wasn't the only one. Although I will admit that the non-beer drinkers were a very small minority at the meet! But we weren't discriminated ! Really!

All v3alpha kernel changes are already in the Hijack source tree, folks! (not much to speak of, really).

Hijack the unlink system call

That won't necessarily work. The last music-hosing bug totally screwed up the filesystem. It wasn't that simple.

That won't necessarily work. The last music-hosing bug totally screwed up the filesystem. It wasn't that simple.

Unless it was something involving unmounted writes, and depending on how you do those, even then, there's still limited damage you can do that the kernel can't be modified to simply not allow. Doesn't really do much good for testing, of course.

But then, that's what backup empegs are for. This one ate itself? Pull out the spare, plug it in, keep driving.

Unless it was something involving unmounted writes, and depending on how you do those, even then, there's still limited damage you can do that the kernel can't be modified to simply not allow.

It was all to do with writes done by fsck to a read-only mounted partition (and not, as it should have been, an unmounted partition). Suborning unlink() would not have saved these people; preventing direct partition writes on mounted filesystems might have, but realising that this was a potential problem equalled no more and no less than discovering the bug anyway.

Peter