This is a neat trick to reduce Foolscap overhead, but the need for an
explicit flush() complicates the Retrieve path and makes it prone to
lost-progress bugs.
Also change test_mutable.FakeStorageServer to tolerate multiple reads of the
same share in a row, a limitation exposed by turning off the queue.
Without this, we get a regression when modifying a mutable file that was
created with more shares (larger N) than our current tahoe.cfg . The
modification attempt creates new versions of the (0,1,..,newN-1) shares, but
leaves the old versions of the (newN,..,oldN-1) shares alone (and throws a
assertion error in SDMFSlotWriteProxy.finish_publishing in the process).
The mixed versions that result (some shares with e.g. N=10, some with N=20,
such that both versions are recoverable) cause problems for the Publish code,
even before MDMF landed. Might be related to refs #1390 and refs #1042.
The changes in layout.py are mostly concerned with the MDMF share
format. In particular, we define read and write proxy objects used by
retrieval, publishing, and other code to write and read the MDMF share
format. We create equivalent proxies for SDMF objects so that these
objects can be suitably general.
we actually exercise during tests) into more specific exceptions, so they
don't get optimized away. The best rule to follow is probably this: if an
exception is worth testing, then it's part of the API, and AssertionError
should never be part of the API. Closes#749.
