file system notifications

[Flavio Castelli]

On Sunday 03 June 2007 00:46, you wrote:
> I am curious. Have you tried fam? As far as I know, fam was created so
> that developers won't have to bother about the mechanism they should use
> to get file notifications.
Yes I looked at fam and gamin (a project that extends fam) but I didn't choose 
them.

Fam has lot of problems (first of all in some situations it can take lots of 
cpu cicles) and its development seems abandoned.
Both fam and gamin use native file system notification structures when 
available and use polling as a fall-back mechanism. Since kqueue has some 
limitations (as exposed in my first post), it's really hard to develop a good 
notification mechanism without falling back to polling or using a 
mixed-approach.

Just an example.
Suppose you have told kqueue to watch dir /tmp/foo. If you 
create/delete/rename/update a file/dir inside /tmp/foo, kqueue will tell you 
an event has occurred inside the watched directory. Kqueue's limitation is 
the lack of informations associated to the event since it _doesn't_ tell what 
happened. So a program has to walk across the watched dir (where the event 
took place) and find the changes that happened.

Now, what I really like to know is if there is another system notification 
mechanism that works like inotify or fsevents.
I would also use kqueue if there's a way to make it generate more 
informations.

Cheers
	Flavio
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