Re: making FAM a required dependency

[Alex Graveley <alex ximian com>]

Hi,

This is somewhat off-topic, but monitoring discussions are few and far
between :-)

I would like to have a second per-user daemon that is knowledgeable
about gnome-vfs.  This would allow us to have local changes to non-file
vfs methods replicated across the system/desktop.  The progression would
basically be:

application changes foo:///blah
    the foo module notifies the daemon of the change
        the daemon then notifies any listeners of foo:///blah

This is useful for things like ssh, vfolder, smb, or any other
non-local-file method where external changes would otherwise not be
noticed.

-Alex

P.S. - I could see the argument for forking the FAM code and rolling
into this sort of daemon.  The FAM code is old and ill-maintained, and
since it would be wrapped rather tightly with this second daemon, it
might be worth joining the two.

On Wed, 2002-10-09 at 05:19, Alexander Larsson wrote:
> On 8 Oct 2002, Ian McKellar wrote:
> 
> > On Mon, 2002-09-30 at 15:57, Jeff Waugh wrote:
> > >   3)  dnotify (and other OS-specific notification schemes) support in the
> > >   to-be-written gnome-vfs daemon, or just add dnotify support to gnome-vfs
> > >   without the daemon (which might suck).
> > 
> > dnotify is awful. It uses signals for callbacks. This sucks badly to
> > integrate into the glib mainloop and gnome-vfs's threaded async system.
> > What you end up needing is an external program to catch the signals and
> > then send notifications across a file descriptor. We could call this
> > program "fam"...
> 
> Now and then i pester the kernel people about this. Maybe eventually we'll 
> get something better. For now it's what we have though.
>  
> > On Tue, 2002-10-01 at 02:05, Alexander Larsson wrote:
> > > As a maintainer of FAM in Red Hat i must say i don't like this. FAM is a 
> > > fraigile and crappy piece of code. It has various unwanted dependencies 
> > > and is prone to failure. I've long wanted to do some sort rewrite that 
> > > was more desktop-oriented, but i've never had time.
> > > 
> > You're effectively the FAM maintainer on Linux as far as I can tell :)
> 
> Ick! Please don't tell anyone that :)
> 
> > It does seem crappy but it has the advantage of being quite old code.
> > Its been used actively on IRIX for a long long time 
> 
> Yeah
>  
> > > Do we really need to provide non-optional monitoring in gnome-vfs? It will 
> > > always be optional for non-local filesystems anyway. I see file 
> > > notification as a nice extra, but given its issues its something I do not 
> > > want us to rely on.
> > 
> > The way I've treated the API is that you're asking GnomeVFS "please tell
> > me about modifications to this URI if you happen to find out about
> > them".
> 
> Yes. That sounds about right.
> 
> -- 
> =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
>  Alexander Larsson                                            Red Hat, Inc 
>                    alexl redhat com    alla lysator liu se 
> He's a gun-slinging native American senator who dotes on his loving old ma. 
> She's a man-hating mute advertising executive with a song in her heart and a 
> spring in her step. They fight crime! 
> 
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