Re: [RFC] Simple file monitoring API for GLib

[Emmanuele Bassi <ebassi gmail com>]

[forgot to Cc: the list]

On Mon, 2006-05-08 at 20:06 -0500, Federico Mena Quintero wrote:
> On Mon, 2006-05-08 at 22:49 +0100, Emmanuele Bassi wrote:
> 
> > A while ago, on IRC, Christian Persch made the request[1] that the
> > monitoring of the storage file used by the GtkRecentManager could be
> > overridden by libgnome, so that every application using the GnomeProgram
> > API would automagically have notifications of file changes using
> > gnome-vfs, instead of the default implementation which stat()s the file
> > once in a while[2].
> 
> While having a "monitor a file" abstraction in Glib would be nice, I
> don't think it should be added only to monitor the recent-files storage.

This little API should be more useful that just monitoring the recent
files storage, indeed; this task just forced me to sit down and
implement this API. :-)

> Displaying a list of recent-files is always initiated by the user, and
> all such displays are short-lived:  a File menu, and a file chooser.
> So, you don't need to keep anything up to date continuously.  You can
> just re-read the recent-files storage when the user brings up such a
> list.

The short-lived case is not interesting; but we might also want to have
a more long-lived display of the recent files list - like as an applet,
as a nautilus view, or using gimmie.  I agree that all of these cases
might as well use gnome-vfs to check the recent files storage, but at
that point we would need a gtk_recent_manager_reload() function in order
to let the GtkRecentManager to reload its data - which is a bit awkward.

Ciao,
 Emmanuele.

-- 
Emmanuele Bassi - <ebassi gmail com>
Log: http://log.emmanuelebassi.net