gamin - fam

[Marshall Pierce]

On 05/06/06 01:21, dick hoogendijk wrote:
> Does anybody have a solution for the gamin / fam problem.
> Afaics only the courier package needs FAM still.
> So, I have two questions:
> 
> (a) does courier run well without fam support?
> (b) does courier run with gamin support?
> 
> As it gets more and more packages that depend on gamin and not on fam it
> seems obvious that I change the fam support to gamin. But I don't want to
> harm my courier mailer system (I use the MTA, IMAP and POP3 units)
> 


I could be wrong, but the I'm pretty sure that the last time I checked,
courier-imapd (which is the only one of the three that I use) only
needed fam if you wanted to use its "enhanced idle" mode that will
notify clients when mail arrives (by watching users' maildirs with fam)
in pretty close to real-time. I use it, and it's a nice (if essentially
cosmetic) feature.

I don't think the POP protocol has any facility similar to IMAP's
enhanced idle, so I don't see how fam would be used there. I use Postfix
for my MTA, so I am not familiar with courier's MTA, but I suspect that
it wouldn't use fam either. (Why would it need to?) If you're willing to
simply check for new (IMAP) mail every X minutes, then you don't need
fam. (I think. :)

I haven't tried getting it to use gamin, though.

-Marshall Pierce