Re: making FAM a required dependency

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On 8 Oct 2002, Ian McKellar wrote:

> On Mon, 2002-09-30 at 15:57, Jeff Waugh wrote:
> >   3)  dnotify (and other OS-specific notification schemes) support in the
> >   to-be-written gnome-vfs daemon, or just add dnotify support to gnome-vfs
> >   without the daemon (which might suck).
> 
> dnotify is awful. It uses signals for callbacks. This sucks badly to
> integrate into the glib mainloop and gnome-vfs's threaded async system.
> What you end up needing is an external program to catch the signals and
> then send notifications across a file descriptor. We could call this
> program "fam"...

Now and then i pester the kernel people about this. Maybe eventually we'll 
get something better. For now it's what we have though.
 
> On Tue, 2002-10-01 at 02:05, Alexander Larsson wrote:
> > As a maintainer of FAM in Red Hat i must say i don't like this. FAM is a 
> > fraigile and crappy piece of code. It has various unwanted dependencies 
> > and is prone to failure. I've long wanted to do some sort rewrite that 
> > was more desktop-oriented, but i've never had time.
> > 
> You're effectively the FAM maintainer on Linux as far as I can tell :)

Ick! Please don't tell anyone that :)

> It does seem crappy but it has the advantage of being quite old code.
> Its been used actively on IRIX for a long long time 

Yeah
 
> > Do we really need to provide non-optional monitoring in gnome-vfs? It will 
> > always be optional for non-local filesystems anyway. I see file 
> > notification as a nice extra, but given its issues its something I do not 
> > want us to rely on.
> 
> The way I've treated the API is that you're asking GnomeVFS "please tell
> me about modifications to this URI if you happen to find out about
> them".

Yes. That sounds about right.

-- 
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
 Alexander Larsson                                            Red Hat, Inc 
                   alexl redhat com    alla lysator liu se 
He's a gun-slinging native American senator who dotes on his loving old ma. 
She's a man-hating mute advertising executive with a song in her heart and a 
spring in her step. They fight crime!