[arch-dev-public] Replacing FAM with native inotify or gamin?

[Dan McGee]

On Fri, Jul 15, 2011 at 3:20 AM, Jan de Groot <jan at jgc.homeip.net> wrote:
> Looking at our fam package, I see pkgrel=15, 4 patches and no upstream
> development. One of these patches even implements the use of DNotify,
> which is a limited deprecated kernel API also.
>
> I would suggest to drop FAM support where inotify is available. This
> means that samba and gnome-vfs should drop FAM support. For other uses,
> like courier-imap that uses fam/gamin for IMAP IDLE support, I would
> suggest replacing fam with gamin. Snd seems to use fam for file
> information updates, so if we want to keep this functionality, it should
> depend on gamin also.
>
> Deprecating fam like this means we'll lose one functionality: remote
> monitoring of files on NFS shares. This is the main reason why I have
> always objected against replacing fam with gamin. Gamin emulates this
> behaviour by using polling. Inotify doesn't support it AFAIK.
>
> The reason why I'm bringing this up is because at this moment FAM is
> only a dependency of very few remaining packages. For each of these
> packages, I doubt NFS fam support is a critical feature:
> - samba: I see no reason to export NFS shares trough samba on a
> different box
> - gnome-vfs: deprecated by itself. We don't ship fam support in GIO
> either, never done it, so nobody uses it on a desktop
> - courier-imap: serving mail from NFS has always been discouraged

+1 from me.

-Dan