Re: [Tracker] the story on NFS

[Calvin Walton <calvin walton kepstin ca>]

On Thu, 2013-11-14 at 16:26 -0500, Brian J. Murrell wrote:
> On Thu, 2013-11-14 at 16:17 -0500, Calvin Walton wrote:
> > The first thing to check is that your client machine actually has the
> > "real" fam installed. Most linux desktops will have gamin installed
> > instead, which provides an ABI-compatible library, but does not support
> > the remote access protocol that fam uses.
>
> Well damn:
>
> $ rpm -qa | grep -e fam -e gamin
> gamin-0.1.10-14.fc19.x86_64
>
> What's the point of providing an ABI compatible to fam that doesn't do
> what fam does?

Keep in mind that this is all based on recall, and I might not be
remembering things accurately...

The original reason behind Gamin was that software like some Gnome
applications had begun to rely on the FAM interface (this was Gnome 2
days, well before file monitoring was included in glib), and FAM had
become basically unmaintained or unresponsive; in particular, nobody was
able to get support for inotify added to FAM (it relied on polling,
iirc).

As a way to improve applications which (for the most part) used local
discs, Gamin was developed as a simpler replacement to FAM which
supported the fancy new local filesystem monitoring APIs on linux, and
dropped the (complex and thought to be mostly unused) network support.
We all loved it, because it meant we didn't need to poll our hard drives
any more.

Most modern distributions don't even bother packaging FAM, as far as I
know; it hasn't had a release since 2003. I would love to see a modern
version of FAM come back some day to solve the NFS case...

-- 
Calvin Walton <calvin walton kepstin ca>