[gamin] Re: [PATCH] inotify 0.5

[John McCutchan <ttb tentacle dhs org>]

On Sun, 2004-07-18 at 23:37, Daniel Veillard wrote:
> On Sun, Jul 18, 2004 at 03:49:27PM -0400, John McCutchan wrote:
> [...]
> > I have attached a tarball, which includes the patch for linux 2.6.7 and
> > a small test app.
> > 
> > I have tested this on my system and AFAIK it is working. No doubt it has
> > plenty of bugs.
> > 
> > I plan on adding an inotify backend to gamin soon.

> But I think it misses the really good point of inotify as I see
> it, i.e. there is no need anymore of a daemon outside the application
> space, in practice I would rather see inotify plugged at the gnome-vfs
> level. The reason is that you will just need to monitor the inotify
> file descriptor, which is easy to do at the gnome-vfs level since you
> have glib and loop access, while in libgamin this would either require
> disabling dnotify if inotify is available (FAM has only one fd registered
> at the application layer), or use the daemon for inotify too.
> The only advantage of using the daemon would be for advanced features
> like congestion control, which are not available (yet ?) in gamin.
> 
>   inotify sounds good to me, I hope it won't be bounced by the kernels
> people.


I think that having a daemon (not necessarily FAM/gamin) or maybe a nice
library in between inotify and applications makes sense. The daemon
could act as a multiplexer and could merge events before passing them on
to the client.

My original plan for inotify was not well liked by Al Viro. I have
drastically changed the kernel-user interface based on his comments and
I hope this new version will be received well.

One question about gamin, why does it not have a backend shutdown
routine? 

John