Re: [Emacs-diffs] trunk r115439: * autorevert.el (auto-revert-notify-add-watch): Do not handle symlinked files.

[Michael Albinus]

Stefan Monnier <address@hidden> writes:

>> +  (when (or (string-match auto-revert-notify-exclude-dir-regexp
>> +                      (expand-file-name default-directory))
>> +        (not (file-symlink-p buffer-file-name)))
>
> I think this patch is acceptable, but if/when we try to write a generic
> file-watcher Elisp API, it would be good to make this work (probably by
> adding a watcher on the symlink's target).

That was my first idea, too. But when I tried to implement this, there
were too much performance penalties, which would eat the advantages of
file notifications. So I've decided to exclude symlinks, at least until
there's a better way to support symlinks.

As far as I am aware, inotify could support symbolic links and their
targets. For glib it seems to depend on the implementation. For kqueue
(*BSD, Mac OS X; candidate as further basic library) I don't know how
it is handled.

In short, it might be necessary to extend the filenotify.el API and the
underlying libraries in order to determine how to handle
symlinks. Nothing we should do days before the feature freeze, IMHO.

>         Stefan

Best regards, Michael.