Re: Inotify

[Richard Boulton <richard tartarus org>]

On Wed, 2004-10-06 at 21:12 -0400, Robert Love wrote:
> Inotify is a kernel feature that is currently not in the mainline
> kernel, so you have to apply it as a patch.

Inotify looks like a good thing.  However, it seems to me that it would
be good if Beagle could still work to some extent even when inotify is
absent - I would guess that even a couple of years in the future many
people won't be running recent enough kernels to get inotify.

I've been wondering if it would be possible to "simulate" inotify with a
user space daemon (or just a thread in beagled) which polls the
filesystem, and sends events when it spots a change.  Obviously this
would be vastly inferior to inotify itself, but would be entirely
portable, and shouldn't need to affect the architecture of beagle in any
deleterious manner.

I have a fair amount of experience with writing webcrawlers, and it
occurs to me that the same algorithms that a webcrawler uses to revisit
frequently changing areas of the web more often than relatively static
areas would be applicable here.

How could such a system be integrated with beagle?  I would imagine that
a different implementation of the Inotify class would be created which
used the daemon instead of listening for kernel events.  Alternatively,
the system could run as a daemon and send events to beagle over dbus.
Any suggestions?

If it's not a silly idea, I'd be interested in starting writing such a
system.

[Quick introduction: I've been following the list for a little while - I
make my living writing and integrating search engine technology, so I
ought to be able to help Beagle in various ways, provided I can find the
time.  I'm also a developer (and original designer) of the Xapian search
engine library (http://www.xapian.org)...]

-- 
Richard Boulton <richard tartarus org>