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

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

> 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/.
> 
> Simeon Bird wrote:
>     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.]

I totally agree with David here. This looks like a bad solution to a correctly identified problem to me. The current situation that metadata is lost without users noticing is certainly a big problem. However asking users to fiddle with parts of their system they likely have never heard of (even if they have admin privileges) is not the solution.
Your suggestion for the new text is better than the original one, but it probably still scares users more than it helps (I don't expect many users to actually call their sysadmin after reading a notification they probably don't understand anyway).
Personally, I think we'll have to tackle the problem at its core: The solution must be to prevent running out of inodes in the first place, period.  We can do this by
a) Thinking hard about a solution which requires less inodes or doesn't lose data if there are not enough left (to me this is the "proper" solution, but one which might require lots of effort and big changes to Nepomuk)
b) Convince those distros shipping KDE by default to increase the inodes to a sensible number by default and those that do not ship it by default but offer it for installation to put a hint to increase the number to X (sensible value) into the post-installation messages (so that the admin who installs KDE sees the message and can act immediately)


- Thomas


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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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