Re: fam vs. gamin

[Jamie McCracken <jamiemcc blueyonder co uk>]

Matthias Clasen wrote:
> 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...

hopefully the new G-VFS proposal will provide the interfaces/hooks to 
the available file notification mechanisms (just in case one is more 
suitable over NFS than the other).


--
Mr Jamie McCracken
http://jamiemcc.livejournal.com/