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Re: [geclipse-dev] GRIA data managmement
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> > Yes, i agree with that. Empty or "full" but with 0 bytes makes no
> > practical difference for the user (and even 1-byte big means for all
> > practical purposes also 'empty' ;-)) . Also normal filemanagers don't
> > distinguish between files which are 0 bytes big and others.
>
> I disagree. 0-byte file is something completely different than no file.
>
> E.g. 0-bytes output file from my software means some problem with
> computation or writing data. No file means that my software crashed
> before computation part.
> E.g.2 My software can look into local directory if file exists or
> not and take some actions or not. Than I can modify the application
> behaviour just be filling or clearing stager without modifying job
> description. (This is not possible now for GRIA because job submission
> failes if input data set to empty stager)
>
> Another usage is a file as a semaphor. Existence or not of such file is
> very important. E.g. look into /etc/grid-security/gridmapdir/ on any
> gLite machine. There a plenty of 0-bytes files. But try to delete them
> and you will fall into problems very soon.
i guess the vicinity of your holidays is making you behave strangely... you
really meant using gLite as an example to follow? ;-) hahaha
Anyway, yes you're right of course, but grid files shouldn't be used as a
semaphore, and regarding application output... i would expect that the
application itself is able to report errors in a more reasonable way than
having to look if a file exists or not to decide what happened...
But yes it is true that from the API point of view there could be some use
case there... from the pure GUI point of view i really would try to avoid
that. And as Mariusz already pointed out that distinction would be very
difficult (or impossible) to make restricting to EFS.
And we already had this discussion with advantages/disadvantages when we
decided about representing stagers as files or as folders!
My 1 old zimbawe dollar cent ;-)
Ariel
