[Nepomuk] Review Request: Create a taskbar notification window when we run out of inotify watches

[Simeon Bird]

> On Oct. 13, 2012, 1:20 a.m., David Edmundson wrote:
> > From a usability perspective you can't show random popups telling the user to run commands as root.
> > 
> > 1) It's putting users in a bad habbit, any app can trigger a popup telling someone to run "sudo rm * -Rf". 
> > 2) The vast majority of users aren't in a sys-admin position. Consider all the big KDE deployments to schools, universities and offices. The person using this computer will not have root powers, it's just a pointless helpless error message
> > 3) It looks scary and confusing to a non nerd-user, and looking like a virus to those who know a medium amount.
> > 
> > (from a code POV you're also triggering this every time the limit hits, which assuming the user can't or decides not to change it means this notification will be going off /constantly/.

Ok, would the text:
"Please ask your system administrator to increase the inotify watch limit, or new files will not be indexed."
be better?

We're only triggering the notification once for every time nepomukserver runs and installs the watches, which is usually once per boot.
I take your point about the user not being sysadmin - the sysadmin doesn't even see the notification, so they don't even necessarily know the limit is hit.

How about adding a checkbox to the notification (I personally don't know how to do that, but I imagine it's pretty easy to work out)
to disable it ("Don't show me this again"), and also send a message to syslog (which can't be turned off).

What do you think? Or do you think the notification popup is a bad idea in general?

[Aside, to Vishesh: Would it be sensible to put logic in place to make nepomuk somehow prioritise directories 
with metadata/indexed directories if we do run out of watches? That would be slightly more graceful, no? 
We would still have the possibility of losing data, but it would be somewhat less likely.]


- Simeon


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On Oct. 11, 2012, 5:54 p.m., Simeon Bird wrote:
> 
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> This is an automatically generated e-mail. To reply, visit:
> http://git.reviewboard.kde.org/r/106748/
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> 
> (Updated Oct. 11, 2012, 5:54 p.m.)
> 
> 
> Review request for Nepomuk, KDE Usability, Vishesh Handa, and Sebastian Trueg.
> 
> 
> Description
> -------
> 
> Currently, if we happen to run out of inotify watches in the filewatch service, all we get is a debug message, which is easily lost.
> This patch additionally creates a popup notification to warn people they need to raise the limit.
> 
> I worried that a popup might be a bit too invasive - I considered also just logging to syslog, but that seemed not invasive enough. 
> I figured that since metadata can get lost if the watches are not all installed, being fairly invasive is a good idea. 
> 
> What think you?
> 
> 
> Diffs
> -----
> 
>   services/filewatch/nepomukfilewatch.cpp 83045da 
>   services/filewatch/nepomukfilewatch.notifyrc bfa88a9 
> 
> Diff: http://git.reviewboard.kde.org/r/106748/diff/
> 
> 
> Testing
> -------
> 
> > sudo sysctl fs.inotify.max_user_watches=10 
> > killall nepomukserver && nepomukserver
> 
> Yup, there's a notification.
> 
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Simeon Bird
> 
>

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