Re: GWorkspace future

[Sheldon Gill]

On Wed, 4 Feb 2004 22:53, Enrico Sersale wrote:
> On 2004-02-04 14:35:18 +0200 Larry Cow <larrycow@free.fr> wrote:
> > Sheldon Gill <sheldon@iinet.net.au> wrote:
> >> This is basically fam integration. Do we need a separate daemon to wrap
> >> it?
>
> fswatcher has nothing to do with fam. And there is no linux-specific code
> [snip]
> > The problem is that fam is Linux-only, IIRC. At least, it is
> > Unix-only. If we really want GNUstep to be platform-independent, we
> [snip]

Just for the record, fam actually came from IRIX and it not linux specific.  I 
referred to it specifically because it's IMHO the best solution around for 
POSIX platforms:

* It's quite portable and available on a number of platforms already
* It supports the Linux DNOTIFY mechanism (more efficient than polling)
* It supports other mechanisms where available
* It's being used by those 'other' free desktops
* It's actively developed and maintained.

One feature which should shortly be working well is inter-fam networking. The 
daemon on your machine can ask to be notified for changes on another machine.

In short, using fam on POSIX systems gives us the best features for the least 
work.  It seems to me that, at the moment, fswatcher is just like fam with

That said, by 'basically' I meant a concrete instance of a concept and not 
that GWorkspace should use fam exclusively.  Win32 uses entirely different 
concepts so requires quite a different approach...

My point was that 'fswatcher' is only a part of what is required. Consider:

* icon changes
* preferred application for file type mapping changes
* mount/unmount
* appearance changes (colours, widgets, font size etc)
* service addition/removal

I'm advocating we architect a solution which can encompass all these things. 


Regards,
Sheldon