Three prevailing themes
| Theme | What the community is saying | Representative quotes |
|---|---|---|
| Symlink‑based deployment & locking | Users praise the simplicity of swapping a symlink to switch releases, roll back, or lock resources. | “Still use php deployer each day and works with symlinks as well.” – 10us “Worked pretty well in production systems… new symlink & php graceful restart.” – atmosx |
| Comparisons to other tools & OS update patterns | The discussion links symlink tricks to legacy tools (Capistrano, Stow, Nix) and modern OS OTA mechanisms (Android, Chrome). | “Ah, the memories of capistrano, complete with zero‑downtime unicorn handover.” – lloeki “I really liked stow. My toy distro back in the day was based on it.” – bandrami “Android does use snapshots: https://source.android.com/docs/core/ota/virtual_ab.” – LiamPowell |
| Limits of atomic filesystem operations | Participants note that rename, renameat2, and transactional APIs are often single‑file or OS‑specific, and that true multi‑object transactions are hard to achieve. |
“Even though it can do some things atomically, it only does with one file at a time, and race conditions are still possible.” – zzo38computer “Windows had APIs for this sort of thing added in Vista, but they're now deprecating it ‘due to its complexity and various nuances which developers need to consider’.” – ptx “Title says Unix, renameat2 is Linux‑only.” – oguz‑ismail2 |