Re: Gnome/Gtk and thread safety

[Alexander Larsson <alla lysator liu se>]

On 17 Oct 2000, Maciej Stachowiak wrote:

> > Say I'm working on my website. I have the html open in Emacs, an image open
> > in the Gimp, and Mozilla up to preview the result. I paint a new stroke on
> > the image. Why doesn't Mozilla show it right away? I type some more html
> > code in Emacs. Why isn't the display updating, dammit?! All current systems
> > have this shortcoming because they only make use of the filesystem, which
> > cannot relay change notifications or updates. I am working on a system that
> > conquers this problem by using "live" data buffers maintained in, and
> > broadcast from, a server process.
> 
> Ah, live updates. This sounds like a cool idea. Are you aware of SGI's
> fam and imon projects for Linux, which provide file monitoring in a
> generic way, not specific to "media"? It is used by efm and will be
> used by a future version of Nautilus.

Are you aware of the recent directory notification mechanism that went
into linux 2.4.0-test9-pre5 (or something, it's in test9). 

It is basically a fcntl called F_NOTIFY. Here are the flags (from
linux/fcntl.h):

/*
 * Request nofications on a directory.
 * See below for events that may be notified.
 */
#define F_NOTIFY       (F_LINUX_SPECIFIC_BASE+2)

/*
 * Types of directory notifications that may be requested.
 */
#define DN_ACCESS      0x00000001      /* File accessed */
#define DN_MODIFY      0x00000002      /* File modified */
#define DN_CREATE      0x00000004      /* File created */
#define DN_DELETE      0x00000008      /* File removed */
#define DN_RENAME      0x00000010      /* File renamed */
#define DN_ATTRIB      0x00000020      /* File changed attibutes */
#define DN_MULTISHOT   0x80000000      /* Don't remove notifier */

/ Alex