Messages in this thread | | | Date | Sun, 21 Aug 2011 13:07:14 -0400 | Subject | Re: PROBLEM: 2.6.35.7 to 3.0 Inotify events missing | From | "J. Bruce Fields" <> |
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On Sat, Aug 20, 2011 at 04:03:35AM +0100, Jamie Lokier wrote: > Well you still have your sense of humour... > > I've never understood why you think it's about the file manager / > desktop, or why you so strongly dislike the feature. It originated > there historically, but that is not it's primary use. > > The implementation, sure, but you seem to dislike the very *principle* > of subscribing to changes. > > Every interesting use of inotify that I've seen is for some kind of > cache support, to eliminate the majority of stat() calls, to remove > disk I/O (no stat means no inode), to ensure correctness (st_mtime is > coarse and unreliable),
It seems rather fragile as an mtime replacement unless it's also got some sort of logging built in at a pretty low level so that you don't lose events while you're not listening.
And of course events have to be defined very carefully to avoid problems such as this one.
> and to avoid having to modify every > application which might affect any file from which cached items are > derived to explicitly notify all the applications which might use any > of those files. > > You like high performance, reliable and correct behaviour, and high > scalability. So I have never understood why you dislike the > change-subscription principle so strongly, because it is a natural > ally to those properties.
I don't think we've seen a design that does all of that yet.
--b.
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