Re: [Nautilus-list] FAM problems

[Alex Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On Fri, 5 Oct 2001, Darin Adler wrote:

> I'd like to return to the nautilus part of this question, just for a moment.
> 
> Does nautilus now require a newer version of FAM? Was the old version of
> nautilus using FAM in a way that was more compatible with the bugs in the
> version of FAM before you fixed the user bug, Alex?

No. Fam was just clearly broken.

> Or are both the newer and older versions of nautilus equally vulnerable to
> the bugs that existed in FAM that you fixed?

Yes.
 
> If the latter, then there's no issue for the upcoming nautilus release. We
> on the gnome project just might want to make sure it's easy for all gnome
> users to get a suitable version of FAM. Or the nautilus release notes should
> at least make it clear that you want to locate one with the bug fix.

The bugs are:

If you connect to fam as different users, the server cannot chown the 
unix domain socket it creates for the second (and the following) 
user connecting, because the code didn't switch from the old 
user to root when doing the chown. This means non-fixed fams really only 
support one user.

When one file changes several times in one second, only the first change 
in that second gets reported. This is because it is impossible for fam to 
detect the changes due to the precision of ctime and mtime as reported by 
stat() only having one-second resolution. This shows up when you save a 
file in e.g. AbiWord. First it truncates the file, then it writes the 
content. Nautilus only gets the first event, so it shows "0 bytes" until 
you refresh. I've fixed fam to also look for size, mode and ownership 
changes, but you can still fool it if you rewrite the contents without 
changing the size several times in a second.

/ Alex