[Ardour-Dev] Trouble with imported files

[Paul Davis]

On Sat, Mar 21, 2009 at 6:43 PM, Fons Adriaensen <fons at kokkinizita.net>wrote:

> Taking up Ardour's way of hard-linking imported
> files when possible, and even when 'no copy' has
> been requested, this has another unexpected
> consequence which hit me today.
>
> When the imported file is replaced with one having
> the same name, the Ardour session doesn't see the
> change, and continues to use the old file.


Fons, I am not writing to disagree with your assessment of the potential
confusion caused by this behaviour. I just want to be pedantic about the use
of the word "replace".

If you "replaced" the file by opening it and writing new data to the file,
Ardour would see the new version. However, in your case, I believe that
"replacement" meant "remove and create a new file of the same name". POSIX
filesystem semantics mean that the removal step left ardour's hard link as
an "orphan". You removed the file. Ardour kept its own copy. This is, in
fact, precisely what hard-linking was intended to ensure. Clearly, it fails
to do so in cases where no hard link is possible, and for this reason, we
should probably remove it because the either/or situation is not good for
anyone.

How do we know that the new file is long enough? The right sample rate? We
don't check these things every time we open a file, because our assumptions
are that we did that when the file was first added to the session. The hard
link was/is there to ensure that whatever you did to the "original", the
version you added to the Ardour session lives on.

As I said at the outset, I agree with you that the current behaviour can
cause confusion. Removing it, however, requires that we institute format &
size checks on every file every time we open it.
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