Soft updates, hard problems

They got a bunch of the important stuff right, too... the "patchgroup" handles are basically fd's, they correctly prevent circular dependencies, they do the Right Thing for all different modes of fs operation (soft-updates: barriers use soft-update magic, full journaling: barriers optimize out, metadata journaling: barriers magically upgrade only those operations with dependencies to use full journaling), and check out this example from the paper:

> The following command line would ensure that 'in' is not removed until all changes in the preceding sort have committed to disk: $ depend 'sort < in > out' 'rm in'

(Of course, really you want shell support, so you can just say 'sort <in >out &&! rm in' or whatever.)

Aw, man, now I'm all excited about a research project from 2007 that will never go anywhere in real life :-(.