Re: shellcommands not executing - lock problem?

[Pete Ehlke]

On Tue Feb 24, 2004 at 12:10:25 -0800, Eric Sorenson wrote:
>
>This would be lots better; this problem has come up several times and
>is always a frustrating stumper. 50 characters is clearly not long enough
>for uniqueness when variable expansion is taken into account. Doubling
>it would help somewhat but it would just be postponing the problem. Note
>this is not just true for shellcommands: but copy: also
>
Yup. Eric and I have talked at some length about this off-list. There's
really no good way to make locking work reliably using the current
algorithm: absolute path names of, say, 1024 characters are pathological
and gross, but they're certainly legal. And in my environment, I have a
fair number of copy: items whose absolute path names do not diverge
until well after 100 characters.

The real solution is to modify the locking scheme to generate a hash of
some sort from the variable name, but that's a somewhat less than
trivial modification. It's on my list of round tuit items, but given my
current schedule and work responsibilities, I doubt that I'll be able to
make any significant progress on a patch for several months.

-Pete