On Tue, Jan 10, 2012 at 1:29 PM, Charles Pritchard <ch...@visc.us> wrote: > Modern operating systems have efficient mechanisms to send a signal when a > watched file or directory is modified. > > File and FileEntry have a last modified date-- currently we must poll entries > to see if the modification date changes. That works completely fine in > practice, but it doesn't give us a chance to exploit the efficiency of some > operating systems in notifying applications about file updates. > > So as a strawman: a File.onupdated event handler may be useful.
It seems like it would be most useful if the File or FileEntry points to a file outside the sandbox defined by the FileSystem spec. Does any browser currently supply such a thing? Chrome currently implements this [with FileEntry] only for ChromeOS components that are implemented as extensions. Does any browser let you have a File outside the sandbox *and* update its modification time? If you're dealing only with FileEntries inside the sandbox, there are already more efficient ways to tell yourself that you've changed something.