Re: Inotify

[Nat Friedman <nat novell com>]

On Thu, 2004-10-07 at 09:18 -0400, Joe Gasiorek wrote:

> With all of these exceptions are we now requireing inotify or is it
> just a helpful feature?
> 
> If we require it, does it limit porting to other platorms?  It also
> requires users to deal with kernels which may limit the testing
> audience.  On the other hand....inotify is freakin' awsome!

Right now, unfortunately, we require it.  This is sadly a barrier to new
people trying out Beagle.  

I'd like to see Beagle run on Windows, eventually, and we'd like to
remove this barrier to taking Beagle for a spin, so the eventual plan is
to integrate inotify into the FileSystemWatcher class in Mono so that
Mono will transparently try inotify or Windows ChangeNotify events, fall
back to Fam, and then optionally poll or do nothing.

We would gladly and eagerly accept patches to Beagle, or, preferably,
exert our influence on the Mono folks to take patches that cleanly allow
us to support non-inotify kernels.

Right now signs are that inotify is getting picked up left and right.
However, if in a month or so this is still a really serious adoption
problem, we'll look into doing the work ourselves.

Nat