On Wed, Mar 03, 2021 at 02:54:58PM -0500, Nicholas D Steeves wrote: > I don't think the removal of FAM is as clear-cut as it has been > presented to be. > > AFAIK the following is still current: Gamin provides "No NFS support > based on specific RPC and server, instead gamin monitors only the state > as reported locally by the kernel, not that locally done changes on NFS > or AFS filesystems are reported on Linux which is the main criteria when > having user home directories on such filesystems." > > https://people.gnome.org/~veillard/gamin/differences.html > > thus FAM covers a use case that gamin does not, and this case is: users > who want to receive inotify style events for files that have been > remotely created or modified on NFS mounts. > > I can't speak to how widespread the need for this feature is, but if it > is non-zero then it seems to me that FAM should not be removed this late > in the Bullseye cycle.
FAM attempts to get notifications for NFS by requiring that a remote FAM server is running on the NFS server. No encryption is used. I hope this is not widely used. FAM code was last modified circa 2003 in the tar ball I downloaded from debian and predates inotify(). However, using FAM or gamin in kcoreaddons is not necessary. Quoting from kcoreaddons src/lib/io/kdirwatch.h: https://invent.kde.org/frameworks/kcoreaddons/-/blob/master/src/lib/io/kdirwatch.h#L44 * The implementation uses the INOTIFY functionality on LINUX. * Otherwise the FAM service is used, when available. * As a last resort, a regular polling for change of modification times * is done; the polling interval is a global config option: * DirWatch/PollInterval and DirWatch/NFSPollInterval for NFS mounted * directories. Please consider removing kcoreaddons dependency on FAM and on gamin in the Debian package. kcoreaddons has its own fallbacks. Also, kcoreaddons is not using FAM or gamin on Linux. > FreeBSD doesn't have inotify, so there is a need for FAM, and maybe > someone from their community has become the defacto upstream (via their > "ports" packaging system)? Or maybe someone from their community would > be willing to officially become FAM's new upstream? FYI: *BSD has kqueue() with EVFILT_VNODE. Please consider removing FAM and gamin from the Debian package for kcoreaddons by removing libfam-dev and libgamin-dev from debian/control, or at least changing it to libgamin-dev. https://salsa.debian.org/qt-kde-team/kde/kcoreaddons/-/merge_requests/3 Cheers, Glenn
