[arch-dev-public] Removing fam from [extra]

[Roman Kyrylych]

On Thu, Jun 11, 2009 at 20:52, Roman Kyrylych<roman.kyrylych at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 11, 2009 at 17:14, Ronald van Haren<pressh at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Thu, Jun 11, 2009 at 2:22 PM, Allan McRae<allan at archlinux.org> wrote:
>>> I would like to remove fam from [extra].  It is old, uses dnotify rather
>>> than the better inotify and does not build without lots of patches.  It
>>> seems the patches we do use create Arch specific issues with log file
>>> filling (FS#14623).  Finally, gamin does most of the job fam does but better
>>> and it is currently in the [community] repo.
>>>
>>> Any objections?  Also, should I bring gamin to [extra] as a replacement or
>>> leave it in [community]? I really do not care which....
>>
>> Every normal file manager should use inotify by itself and not depend
>> on fam/gamin for that. What fam adds is the ability to monitor remote
>> file systems IIRC, gamin does not add anything (of course it adds the
>> basic functionality to file managers which don't have inotify
>> support).
>>
>> so -1 from me
>
> I agree with Ronald here, unless something has changed in gamin in
> these 3+ years
> during which there were numerous feature requests about replacing fam
> with gamin.
> And speaking of changes - this one (from
> http://www.gnome.org/~veillard/gamin/news.html) looks suspicious:
> 0.1.9: Jul 27 2007 Bug fixes: enable polling when using inotify this
> fixes support for NFS partitions

Aha, here's a nice summary of the current fam/gamin status by JGC:
http://bugs.archlinux.org/task/14623#comment45188
> I think this would be the right time to switch to gamin:
> - fam is dead upstream, gamin isn't
> - fam needs a lot of patches to build, gamin builds out of the box
> - fam uses (patched) dnotify, a shitty API that has been replaced by inotify, which is used by gamin
> - fam uses a daemon, gamin works from the library linked to the application
> - fam needs a daemon on the NFS server, gamin does polling (just like fam without dnotify support), this is actually a disadvantage of gamin, if the fam way would work correctly

Allan, you should've posted it from the start ;-)

-- 
Roman Kyrylych (Роман Кирилич)