emelfm2 branch pre-release

For those of you who didn't catch the gist of Robert's recent message,
there's a new pre-release at emelfm2.org/Downloads, with changes
described at emelfm2.org/ChangeLog. In essence, a couple of feature
requests, a couple of TODO's cleared, and a few bugs fixed.

After looking closely into gamin, and exchanging thoughts with some
gamin devs, I concluded that gamin may well work how we'd like it to,
at some time in the future, or it may not ... FAM compliance rules!

So the pre-release supports file-alteration-monitoring for e2 on
linux by directly interrogating the kernel's inotify or dnotify
mechanism. Unless you direct otherwise (by means of an appropriate
'make' parameter - see INSTALL) dnotify will be enabled. In any event,
it's designed to be fail-safe, and fall back to the old time-stamp
checking that would otherwise be used. Use inotify if you can, dnotify
is better than nothing but it ain't great ...

Dnotify has been with linuxers since 2.4.0, I think. If you're not
aware, inotify v 0.24 is in the mainline 2.6.13 linux kernel. Some
earlier kernels have inotify, but mostly an earlier version with a
superseded API. Distros may have disabled it. An easy way to check for
the supported version is to look for /proc/sys/fs/inotify/ containing 3
entries named like max_*

The jury is still out on whether bsd's need something like this.

As ever, feedback is welcome.

Anyone interested in translations?

Regards
Tom


-- 
Users can unsubscribe from the list by sending email to 
emelfm2-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with 'unsubscribe' in the subject field or by 
logging into the web interface.

Other related posts: