Re: autorevert.el

[Luc Teirlinck]

Eli Zaretskii wrote:

   Both of these alternatives sound wrong to me.  I think on Windows
   Emacs should listen to the special message sent by the OS whenever the
   contents of some directory changes.  I believe this is how the Windows
   Explorer and other programs know when to refresh their views of files
   in a directory.

I do not know anything about non-POSIX operating systems and hence
will not be able to do this myself.  I also do not have access to
computers running these operating systems with CVS Emacs installed, so
I could not even check my code, if I were able to write it.  To avoid
misunderstanding, I am _not_ refusing to do it for ideological
reasons, I just am unable to do it.  I could make things convenient
for anybody wanting to do it, in particular there would be no
necessity for that person to know anything about auto-revert.el.

I have not yet completely decided on how to do things, but for the
moment it seems that there might be a `buffer-stale-function' or such
(concrete name still undecided), as Stefan suggested.  In that case,
one would have the choice between adapting the POSIX function, or
giving buffer-stale-function an operating system specific value.

Note that I am not creating a portability problem, I am inheriting a
portability problem from dired.  Any problem that would occur for
auto-revert already occurs now in as far as the "Directory has changed
on disk; type g to update Dired" messages dired prints are concerned.
Any solution to the auto-revert portability problem would also be a
solution to that current portability problem.  If there is no current
portability problem, then there will be no auto-revert portability
problem either.  (I can not check.  In particular, it really would be
hard for me to solve a problem without even being able to check
whether the problem really occurs.)

Sincerely,

Luc.