Suggestion to develop another fs notify service.

[Stef Bon]

Hi,

I'm using KDE for years, and very happy. But as developer of FUSE
filesystems, I run into problems concerning fam and gamin. KDE is
still using gamin if it's installed.

Therefore I'm thinking about developing a new filesystem notify
service, based on a FUSE fs.
My idea is to let applications connect to the service via a socket to
receive events, and let this service do the actions to find out the
events.

Applications can set a "watch" by using extended attributes like:

(if an application is interested n changes in /home/user for example)

mkdir %FUSEROOTDIR%/home
mkdir %FUSEROOTDIR%/home/user

setfattr --name=system.notifyfs_mask --value %somemask% %FUSEROOTDIR%/home/user

The fs now determines based upon configuration, defaults and methods
set at runtime the method to use, like inotify, dnotify, polling or
another method on the underlying fs.

Because the fuse fs can detect the pid of the app seting the xattr, it
will send the events it receives on the underlying fs to the right
socket (if it knows the pid-socket-fd link).

My idea is to make it to use default methiods, which can be changed
per path using extended attributes like
system.notifyfs_method(_global) or something like that.

There is one process required instead of one per usersession when using gamin.

I beleive that the other desktop (Gnome) is already using something
else than gamin.

Anyone thinking this is a good idea?? Please comment, also when not positive.

Stef Bon