Re: gfile-based file notifications are not immediate

[Rüdiger Sonderfeld]

On Wednesday 29 October 2014 15:00:23 Wolfgang Jenkner wrote:
> There's an active project to implement inotify for *BSD
> 
> https://github.com/dmatveev/libinotify-kqueue
> 
> While it still lacks inotify_init1, a year or so ago I worked around
> this by some voodoo and built emacs to use the library.  That basically
> worked (and, IIRC, even passed the inotify-test.el of the time) but in
> some situations removing a watch did not work correctly and a cpu core
> remained pegged at maximum usage while emacs was running.
> 
> So, in the long run, inotify might be the more portable solution.

Glib already seems to use several hacks to work around the limitations of 
kqueue and Glib offers far fewer features than inotify.  Trying to emulate 
inotify on top of kqueue therefore seems like a futile approach.  Unless the 
*BSD folks implement inotify (or at least something similar) in their kernels 
I don't think we can seriously expect inotify to become a portable solution.

Glib meanwhile has a portable implementation and is already used (optionally) 
in GNU Emacs.  I don't think there is a risk of Glib abandoning kqueue support 
and even if they did then we could look at the issue again.

Regards,
Rüdiger