Re: inotify support, nearly there

[Mike Hommey <mh@glandium.org>]

On Wed, Jan 29, 2014 at 01:47:30PM +0700, Duy Nguyen wrote:
> Just a quick update for the enthusiasts. My branch file-watcher [1]
> has got working per-user inotify support. It's a 20 patch series so
> I'll refrain from spamming git@vger for a while, even though it hurts
> your eyes a lot less than what I have posted so far. The test suite
> ran fine with it so it's not that buggy. It has new tests too, even
> though real inotify is not tested in the new tests. Documentation is
> there, either in .txt or comments. Using it is simple:
> 
> $ mkdir ~/.watcher
> $ git file-watcher --detach ~/.watcher
> $ git config --global filewatcher.path $HOME/.watcher
> 
> There's still some polishing work to do. But I think the core logic is
> done. I have some ideas what to be polished, but I'd appreciate
> feedback if anyone uses it. We may need to make lookup code faster
> later.
> 
> MacOS, FreeBSD and Windows contributors. If you have time and are
> interested, have a look at the protocol, which is basically documented
> in file-watcher.c:handle_command(), and see if something is
> incompatible with your file notification mechanism. MacOS and FreeBSD
> may reuse code from file-watcher.c, at least the unix socket part. I'm
> not so sure about Windows. It probably needs a brand new daemon
> because little could be shared, I don't know. I deliberately design
> the daemon dumb so writing a completely new one won't be so hard. My
> plan is focus on inotify and get it merged first, then new OS support
> can come later (with refactoring if needed, but should not change the
> protocol drastically).
> 
> [1] git clone https://github.com/pclouds/git.git file-watcher

Haven't looked at the code, so I don't know if you've done that, but in
case you haven't, it would be nice to have an environment variable or a
config option to make git use the file-watcher *and* normal lstat
operations, to check consistency.

Mike