Re: Recursive modified-timestamp?

[Piotr Neuman <sikkh@wp.pl>]

Dnia sobota 01 styczeñ 2005 14:20, Fred Schaettgen napisa³:
> On Saturday 01 January 2005 13:28, Piotr Neuman wrote:
> > Linux has both inotify and dnotify. I really love the kind of threads
> > where nobody cares to do the research into existing solutions /approaches
> > and everybody are talking about their ideas (which is of course easier
> > than searching on google).
>
> I don't see how dnotify or inotify would help here. You can't monitor whole
> directory trees with it. inotify (which I admittedly didn't know about)
> seems to allow monitoring just about ~8000 files per device. And you don't
> have any guarantee that none of the files changed before the program using
> inotify starts up.

You have the source code, move that limit up, and change data structures if 
it's necesary for efficient working with large trees...

Inotify has the big advantage of being filesystem agnostic, while reiser4 
plugins do not.

> > ps. and yup the GNOME folks are busy coding for inotify instead of
> > imagining "something that may or may not exist". Just becose you send
> > stuff to technical mailing list, doesn't mean you have a clue...
>
> So do the KDE folks (not sure if it's dnotify or inotify or simply
> resorting to whatever FAM uses). But that's just a solution to a slightly
> different problem. So with respect to the question I was asking (after
> searching on google) the comment of Alexander about BeOS was much more
> relevant than yours. I don't know if this was directed towards me, but it's
> true, I don't have a clue about file systems. Maybe that's the reason I had
> to ask my question here. Or where else am I allowed to ask such a question
> in your opinion?

FAM uses the outdated dnotify (just browse lkml.org for info on inotify 
advantages). One of the goals of GNOME now is to have some platform to 
compete with the "fabled" Microsoft WinFS. Inotify could replace the "not so 
small" FAM, for example read:

http://www.ussg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0407.2/0359.html
http://www.gnome.org/~veillard/gamin/overview.html

I hope that low footprint, inotify based solutions will become the standard 
for Linux desktop.

Inotyfy does not support such queries as BeOS did, but knowing the reluctancy 
of kernel developers to do anything that may increase bloat and could be done 
in userspace anyway, I don't think it will be supported.

Good luck on your searches for a new KDE file notification support/system.