Re: [RFC] Simple file monitoring API for GLib

[Emmanuele Bassi <ebassi gmail com>]

Hi Federico,

On Tue, 2006-05-09 at 09:35 -0500, Federico Mena Quintero wrote:
> On Tue, 2006-05-09 at 13:11 +0100, Emmanuele Bassi wrote:
> 
> > This little API should be more useful that just monitoring the recent
> > files storage, indeed; this task just forced me to sit down and
> > implement this API. :-)
> 
> That's the thing - people will see that gnome-vfs has a file monitoring
> API, and that Glib has one as well, and they'll think "the Glib one is
> at a lower level, so it must be BETTER!".  And they'll start abusing it,
> they'll see that it doesn't scale, and blame us.

The documentation is pretty clear: if you need anything else than a
low-tech, simple file notification API, then you must look at gnome-vfs
and steer away from the file monitor in GLib.

> Oh, and also we'll have two file monitoring code bases to maintain.

Well, this code base is really small, and I don't expect/want it to grow
any further; but yours is a valid concern.

> > The short-lived case is not interesting; but we might also want to have
> > a more long-lived display of the recent files list - like as an applet,
> > as a nautilus view, or using gimmie.  I agree that all of these cases
> > might as well use gnome-vfs to check the recent files storage, but at
> > that point we would need a gtk_recent_manager_reload() function in order
> > to let the GtkRecentManager to reload its data - which is a bit awkward.
> 
> I don't think it's inconvenient at all. Those long-lived,
> whole-desktop-ish apps are special anyway.

But every application would have to implement the file monitoring; would
have to know which file are they monitoring, and check for changes.
This would increase the points of failure, because of code replication.

> The *real* problem is that we haven't decided to bite the bullet and
> either completely remove gnome-vfs, or to put it below the GUI part of
> the GNOME stack.

You're right.  And I'd really like for gnome-vfs to be reviewed and
placed below gtk in the stack.  Unfortunately, I don't see queues of
developers out there willing to bite the bullet and dive into that code
base anytime soon.

>   GtkFileSystem is already a mess because we have to
> maintain two pretty complex implementations:  the Unix backend, and the
> gnome-vfs one.  A file monitor in Glib will create exactly the same
> problem.

For the overlapping between gnome-vfs and this API, you're right; but
the overlapping is really thin, given the various limitations of this
API.

Ciao,
 Emmanuele.

-- 
Emmanuele Bassi - <ebassi gmail com>
Log: http://log.emmanuelebassi.net