Re: fam vs. gamin

["Matthias Clasen" <matthias clasen gmail com>]

On 9/29/06, Jan de Groot <jan jgc homeip net> wrote:
> On Fri, 2006-09-29 at 10:49 +0200, Tshepang Lekhonkhobe wrote:
> > There was once a complaint that gamin was unmaintained and buggy such
> > that fam was then recommended, yet I see gamin instead of fam @
> > http://live.gnome.org/TwoPointSeventeen/ExternalDependencies.
> > What am I missing?
>
> Doesn't look good to me: gamin can only do local files, not remote files
> on NFS. Gamin is only useful for inotify and kqueue. I don't know kqueue
> is implemented in gnome-vfs, but at least inotify works perfect on linux
> with gnome-vfs. Fam is only used for NFS shares and is completely
> optional AFAIK.
> One exception is gnome-menus, which needs fam/gamin to monitor files.
> Most distributions have patched up that thing to use either inotify or
> gnome-vfs, so IMHO the dependency isn't right on that page and should
> list a choice between fam or gamin, but certainly not only gamin.

This is a bit of misinformation. gamin works fine on my nfs home directory.
Also gnome-menus _could_ use gnome-vfs to do its monitoring, but
Mark did not want to add such a heavy dependency just for file monitoring.
And besides, gnome-vfs and gamin use identical inotify code, so it is
hard to see what would be improved by using one over the other...

Matthias