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

[Stanislav Brabec <sbrabec suse cz>]

Josselin Mouette píše v Pá 27. 01. 2006 v 14:00 +0100:
> Le vendredi 27 janvier 2006 à 12:12 +0100, Stanislav Brabec a écrit :
> > 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.
> 
> Thus, if we want to have a full functionality, we need either:
>      1. To add inotify support to FAM.

This attempt limited to local files is called gamin.

>      2. To make gnomeVFS use inotify directly on local mounts, and FAM
>         on remote mounts.
> I happen to prefer 1) as it allows FAM to use inotify on the server
> side.

Ideally implement both. For local files, communication with FAM daemon
(an need for running daemon with root privileges and opened network
ports) adds one level of indirectness.

FAM now have some limits, some time ago I tried to do instant mirroring
based on FAM and I have failed on limited number of watched directories.
http://web.archive.org/web/20031009173003/http://atif.developer.ch/

Note: FAM daemon is able to work without server side FAM, but it falls
back to polling, which is not preferred way. If kernel does not support
dnotify/imon, polling is used too. The result is a permanent file system
activity:
http://kernelslacker.livejournal.com/35270.html

-- 
Best Regards / S pozdravem,

Stanislav Brabec
software developer
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