Re: Files, CORBA, and X (brief)

[Alan Cox <alan redhat com>]

> I had a, perhaps crazy, idea last night about handling files.

I don't think the concept is crazy. I've seen it implemented in many
database like setups. Trying to get a common view by file handling as
you suggest does have a few problems

	-	One file, but many paths to it
	-	A document might consist of a set of files (ie you don't 
		know the transaction size)
	-	Dynamic tracking by reading files is a slow approach

The database world a useful concept called transactions - Effectively a way 
to bracket a set of operations. For example you might want to be sure that
you charge the customer and mark the product to be sent in one operation
which fails as a whole or works as a whole

Another common thing I've seen used is "notify me when this changes". This
is more useful and its what we already have at a per file level with the
FAM daemon and nautilus. You can extend that into some kind of 
"interested in machine:path"  and "changed machine:path" notification
scheme. (in actual fact you probably want  "interested in people interested
in machine:path" with a "someone cares" event when a listener shows up -
that avoids sending a lot of unneeded events.

Alan