Re: Inotify

[Jon Trowbridge <trow ximian com>]

On Thu, 2004-10-07 at 14:20 +0100, Richard Boulton wrote:
> I would guess that even a couple of years in the future many
> people won't be running recent enough kernels to get inotify.

Huh?  A couple of years in the future, I hope that inotify is in the
mainline kernel so that everyone just has it.  And regardless of what
the kernel folks do, the commercial distros will probably ship it in
their kernels.  Novell certainly will, and I suspect RH will too.

> 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.

Besides being *massively* inefficient, polling the filesystem gives us
less information that inotify.  For example, if someone does "mv foo
bar" inotify will tell us that the file foo is now bar.  With polling,
all we can know is that foo is gone and that bar has appeared.  This
actually matters, because it means that you'd lose all
non-file-derivable metadata every time a file is renamed.

-J