Re: making FAM a required dependency

["Shahms E. King" <shahms shahms com>]

On Mon, 2002-09-30 at 11:56, Jeffrey Stedfast wrote:
> On Mon, 2002-09-30 at 14:33, James Willcox wrote:
> > Hi all,
> > 
> > gnome-vfs supports the monitoring of local files through FAM.  This is a
> > great feature, but currently it's not one we can depend on, since FAM
> > support is optional.  Consequently, if you want things to work as
> > expected, you have to handle the situation where monitoring isn't
> > supported by implementing your own monitoring stuff.  I see at least 2
> > ways to fix this problem.
> > 
> > 1)  Make FAM a required dependency for gnome-vfs
> > 
> > 2)  Implement a fallback monitoring impl. in gnome-vfs when FAM isn't
> > available.  (only for local files)
> > 
> > IMHO, 1) is the best solution, assuming that FAM works on all the
> > platforms we plan to support.
> 
> it doesn't.
> 
> plus there is no fucking way in hell that I'm going to install FAM.
> 
> Jeff

Except, it does, or could with a little bit of work.  On platforms with
kernel support (IRIX and Linux, atm) it uses those native systems, and
on those without it uses a fallback poll() based system which is
sub-optimal (but exactly what you'd have to implement as a "fallback" in
gnome-vfs, or in an individual application).  IMHO it doesn't make sense
to ignore the extant work in this area and re-implement FAM inside of
gnome-vfs just so we don't have another dependency.

--Shahms