[csw-maintainers] a question of gamin

[Philip Brown]

I've hit something rather odd, about a "new" package, called gamin.
its not exactly new: its a replacement for "fam". gamin is favored by
GNOME peoples. and sun.

The principle is that its a background demon that gets spawned,
watching for "file alterations".
http://people.gnome.org/~veillard/gamin/

The trouble  is:  its horribly horribly written.  Unless you have the
linux specific(of course) kernel calls.. OR some magical opensolaris
hooks... it goes into a huge cpu-stealing polling loop. sucking up 50%
of cpu or worse.

I've tried tweaking its config file to dial down polling interfaces.
It doesnt seem to work.
(Interestingly, i've seen complaints on other systems about it too)

Leaving it as-is, doesnt seem to really be viable. I see a few
options, and I'm soliciting opinions on them:

(option 0: someone else finds a fix for it ;-)

option:  Just ship the client-side lib, but disable/not ship the backend demon.
   On OpenSolaris, it will actually integrate with an already running
/usr/lib/gam_server, and work great.
  Otherwise, it ("it" being gtk/glib) will whine a few times to
stdout/err... and then shut up with no harm done.
  Hmm... CORRECTION. while gimp and firefox handle this nicely.. our
old-old 'gedit', crashes badly, unless it can actually FIND it.
   arrg. So, this option does not seem viable

option: leave as-is. yuk.

option: Completely disable "FAM" support from glib, and other things
we have, such as gnome-vfs
   I'm honestly not sure what exactly we "lose" this way. or rather,
not sure its that important.
See http://www.opencsw.org/packages/fam/ for dependant packages.


side note: the original "libfam" is an orphaned project from sgi.com.
hasnt been touched in 6 years? and
requires modifying inetd.conf. for a user-level tool. yuk.
gamin seems to be the only replacement going forward.