As long as you only consider it, all will be fine ;-). As a user I don't
want to use a filesystem which leaves a long gap between renaming the
metadata and writing the data for it, that is having dirty, inconsistent
metadata overwriting clean metadata. So Ted's quick pragmatic approach
to patch it in the first step was good, even if it's possible that it's
not be the final solution.
Flushing in applications is not a suitable solution. Maybe barriers
could be a solution, but to get something like this into _all_ the
multitude of applications is very unlikely.
There might be filesystems which use a delayed, but ordered mode. They
could provide "atomic" renames, and perform much better, if applications
do not flush with every file update.
Andreas
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