Re: [PATCH] Added basic file system watching support.

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Michael Albinus <address@hidden>
> Cc: address@hidden,  address@hidden,  address@hidden,  address@hidden
> Date: Mon, 07 Jan 2013 12:33:26 +0100
> 
> Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> writes:
> 
> > IMO, this design is wrong.  Tramp is just one more back-end for this
> > feature, in addition to two others: inotify and w32notify.  So I think
> > Tramp handlers should be called from a higher-level code, one that
> > calls whichever back-end is appropriate.  Otherwise, we will need to
> > implement the Tramp support twice, in 2 different sets of primitives.
> >
> > Which, of course, goes back to the kind of design discussion I
> > suggested to have at the time, where we were supposed to consider
> > various alternatives and eventually agree on some higher-level APIs.
> > Jumping to coding right away is IMO not the right way.  E.g.,
> > currently there are subtle but very real differences between the 2
> > back-ends: w32notify doesn't accept t or a lone symbol as the 2nd
> > argument (it insists on getting a list); the list of supported watch
> > types is entirely different; and the w32 back-ends actually watches
> > the entire directory of the file, not just that file.
> >
> > IOW, this feature is not really ready for Tramp-ization, or for
> > user-land in general.  Stefan wanted people to experiment with this
> > and gather experience, before we know enough to discuss how to make it
> > user- and Lisp-friendly.
> 
> Is there any progress on this? Any attempt of a unified interface?

Not that I'm aware of, no.  OTOH, I haven't seen any attempts to use
the feature in any Lisp package, either.  Maybe we just don't need it ;-)