fam/gamin/inotify [was: Re: New schemas...]

[Stanislav Brabec <sbrabec suse cz>]

Josselin Mouette píše v Pá 27. 01. 2006 v 08:59 +0100:
> Le jeudi 26 janvier 2006 à 17:42 -0600, Federico Mena Quintero a écrit :
> > On Thu, 2006-01-26 at 14:51 +0100, Josselin Mouette wrote:
> > > Watching them with fam/gamin should be possible to achieve with the
> > > merged tree backend. Sadly, gnome-VFS is out of question because it
> > > depends on GConf itself.
> > 
> > Rumor says that gamin isn't maintained anymore.
> 
> But fam is in a sufficiently stable state now.

But FAM does not support inotify, at least as is. Only dnotify and
polling. And network notification.

> > Let's just move to inotify directly.  Other unixes will have to catch
> > up.

KDE does the same, too - for local files it uses inotify directly, for
remote files it uses FAM.

> Does inotify handle NFS mounts?

No, you need network notification, i. e. FAM running on both client and
server. In theory, network notification daemon can use inotify on NFS
server side.

I am not a kernel hacker, but maybe it is possible to "hide" network
notification into kernel and use inotify from user space.


In SuSE/OpenSuSE we use a dirty trick:

- gamin does not provide libfam.so.0
- gnome-vfs and libgda does not link with libfam.so.0
- gnome-vfs and libgda has a wrapper for dynamic loading of file
  notification:
  - Use libgamin-1.so.0, if gamin is installed and fam daemon is not
    running.
  - Use libfam.so.0 otherwise.
  - RPM dependencies should guarantee, that one of these two libraries 
    is installed.

-- 
Best Regards / S pozdravem,

Stanislav Brabec
software developer
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