Re: win_acls changes trigger creation of increments

Hi,

On 22/04/2021 05:15, Robert Nichols wrote:
> On 4/21/21 12:08 PM, Patrik Dufresne wrote:
> [snip]
>> 1. I'm not aware of any changes in the logic between 1.2.8 and 2.0.5
>> regarding Win_acls. So I'm expecting this to be an issue in 2.0.5. Is 
>> it ?
>> 2. Would we consider this normal behavior to create increments (empty
>> increment) when the only changes are metadata changes ?
> 
> It's been that way since forever, and it's not unique to Windows ACLs.
> Changes that affect only file metadata cause these "zero-diff" files to
> be created, and since they are compressed, they are not empty files but
> actually occupy a disk block. Places like /usr/src/kernels and
> /var/lib/yum/yumdb, which make extensive use of hard links, cause
> thousands of these files to be generated every time there is an update.
> I wrote a rather messy audit to get rid of them, and the first time I
> ran it resulted in over 4,000,000 files being deleted.

What Robert just wrote. We could possibly optimize the recognition that 
a file content didn't change, avoiding some data churning (and perhaps 
even empty compressed files) but that would be an enhancement.

KR, Eric