Re: on issues of recursive monitoring and races therein

[Jon Trowbridge <trow ximian com>]

On Mon, 2004-10-04 at 00:48 -0400, Robert Love wrote:
> Been thinking about eliminating the risk of races with recursive
> monitoring in Beagle.
> <snip>

Yes, the algorithm you describe ensures that a watch is placed on every
directory.

I'm still not convinced, though, that this one-directory-at-a-time
synthesized recursive monitoring is equivalent to true recursive
monitoring.  It would be nice if we could guarantee something like this:

Given complete information about the initial state of a watched
directory tree, and given a list of all of the inotify events generated
by a set of file operations on that tree, it is possible to accurately
compute the final state of the tree.

Obviously this property holds for a single directory.  I don't think it
holds in general... I think we could leak an event if a file is created
in a new directory before a watch can be set up in that directory.

-J