Re: FAM/inotify/dnotify support for beagle

[Jon Trowbridge <trow ximian com>]

On Wed, 2004-07-28 at 20:49 -0700, Matt Jones wrote:
> Does anyone know of a way to recursively monitor directories for file
> changes (or even just creations)? 

Building an indexing daemon that watches for file changes is definitely
the right thing to do.  The beagle crawler has always just been a stop-
gap solution to allow us to populate the index with some data.

Unfortunately, there is no reasonable way to recursively monitor a piece
of the filesystem with dnotify.  Our plan is to use the new kernel event
layer[1] to get notification of filesystem events via d-bus.  The
indexing daemon will listen for those signals and re-index on the fly.

> Thus, my second concern/question - how do we choose what directories
> to monitor?

There is no way we can make that choice, which is why we've rejected a
dnotify-based solution.  We want beagle to be able to find things
anywhere on your system, and not be limited to files that live in a few
special directories.

> I'm probably going to start writing some basic code for this within
> the next couple of days 

If you wanted to set up the framework of a simple dbus-aware daemon,
that would be great.  Until the kernel work is done[2] we can fake
filesystem change notifications with dbus-send.  

> (I'm finishing up a panel applet for beagle
> which I'll send in to the list pretty soon).

Please do send it to the list... I'd love to see it.

Thanks,
-J

[1] http://freedesktop.org/pipermail/dbus/2004-July/001326.html
[2] This will hopefully happen in the next few weeks.