[Development] Notifyfs: a fsevent monitor.

Robin Burchell robin+qt at viroteck.net
Thu May 17 19:52:54 CEST 2012


On Thu, May 17, 2012 at 7:37 PM, Stef Bon <stefbon at gmail.com> wrote:
> Then contacted Thiago Macieira for suggestions about howto test
> notifyfs (that’s the name of it) as backend of QFileSystemWatcher. He
> suggested me posting a message here, since QFileSystemWatcher is
> “flawed by design” (his words) and a replacement is required.

This isn't really related to the rest of your mail, but uh, I don't think so.

It had issues that were mostly fixed for 5.0 (the underlying engines
were always threaded, meaning there was no real rate-limiting on the
notifications to the actual QFileSystemWatcher isntances), which I
fixed, and it has some _limitations_ in that the signals it provides -
particularly for directories - that aren't very useful that I have
patches fixing for 5.1 (after which I'll consider the old signals more
or less deprecated). I also have plans for nicer helper API on top
(e.g. a QPathMonitor object, or something similar to that) which I'll
probably also try to find time for for 5.1. If Thiago still considers
it flawed by design, I'd like to know why, because I spent quite a few
days working on all of this, and I don't see anything wrong with it
anymore.

> So here I present notifyfs. Here a copy from the project website:
>
> Notifyfs is a FUSE overlay fs, which tries to stay uptodate with the
> underlying filesystems.
>
<snip>

OK, so this is something like Gamin/FAM, except presumably providing
inotify-alike notifications for filesystems other than/in addition to
local files? Sounds somewhat interesting. As I said to you in private
mail, I'd be interested to see a QFileSystemWatcher backend for it, if
you can promise that you'll be maintaining it: and no, it won't just
be a matter of fixing the occasional bugs, as I mentioned, there's at
least the upcoming engine changes in 5.1 for providing more
fine-grained notification signals in the pipeline.



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