Re: [PATCH] Added inotify support.

[Óscar Fuentes]

Stefan Monnier <address@hidden> writes:

>>> > I have no intention to rip out polling.  Rather I hope that the
>>> > higher-level API we come up with can be implemented by any of Windows's
>>> > low-level API, inotify, MacOSX's equvalent, or polling.
>>> ... which is what I hoped to hear.
>> Plus combinations of the above, as needed.  Right?
>
> If someone bothers to implement it, why not, tho I'm not sure how
> important that would be (unless that patch can automatically figure out
> when to use which).

In theory, it is possible to automatically figure out when to use
polling and when to use the OS notification features. But if inotify
doesn't work on some filesystems, we need a method for detecting those
filesystems. Does inotify report "I don't work on this" when it is used
on those unsupported filesystems?

Eli and I discussed the high level Lisp API for filesystem
notifications. I think it is compatible with polling, in the sense that
it can transparently fall back to polling, once the issue mentioned on
the previous paragraph is addressed.