[Thunar-dev] fam & gamin support in thunar

[Benedikt Meurer]

Yves-Alexis Perez wrote:
> Hi people.

Hey Yves-Alexis,

> Thunar Debian package is currently built against gamin, and depends on
> this package, to provide file monitoring. But gnome debian team decided
> to orphan this package [0], because gnome-vfs now has inotify support,
> so they don't need (on linux) another file monitoring tool. 

Jap, that's a pretty bad design decision in GNOME, dunno what's the
point, but hey... it's GNOME.

> On a blog post, benny said [1] that he recommended gamin over fam, and I
> (we) wanted to know what was its point, now. (and opinions from the
> list, too).
> 
> We (debian team) currently have some choices:
> * do nothing, and hope somebody adopt gamin package or that it doesnt
> break
> * adopt gamin package and try to keep it working (it seems that it's not
> developped anymore upstream), at least for us (don't know the workload)
> * switch to fam (we don't really like this because benny recommended
> gamin and we don't really like the "system service" thing over the "user
> daemon" one
> 
> I wanted to ask people about the gamin/fam preference currently. Do you
> have any thoughts ? :)

Gamin offers "native" file monitoring support on various systems, while
FAM currently uses stat() on most systems (IIRC, IRIX is the only one
supported "natively"). The additional advantage of Gamin is that it runs
as part of the users session and not as system daemon, which is
recommended on Linux for various FUSE file systems, etc.

> Benny, do you have any plan to add inotify support to thunar-vfs at one
> time, or really don't want to include that (linux-specific) thing and
> want to keep it separate, using some third-party app ?

I really don't see the point there. It's additional maintaince overhead
for a single OS that offers no advantage over Gamin, which is portable.
inotify was not designed with a generic, extensible API in mind, so
Linux will have to replace that with a better solution at some point
anyway, and gnome-vfs/thunar-vfs/etc. will have to be updated once
again. With Gamin, there's one single place to update.

Benedikt