On Wed, Mar 03, 2021 at 02:54:58PM -0500, Nicholas D Steeves wrote: > Hi, > > Glenn Strauss <gs-debian....@gluelogic.com> writes: > > > gamin provides libfam0. > > > > kcoreaddons should load just fine with libfam0 from gamin. > > > > I did the research in #510368 and #966273, reviewing the actual code > > and confidentally concluded that FAM can be removed from Bullseye. > > > > The safest choice is to have a single library (gamin) used in the > > distro, rather than having both FAM and gamin. > > > > 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. > > Also, IIRC gamin depends on Linux-specific features such as inotify > where FAM provides fallbacks (eg: IIRC FAM is required on kfreebsd and > hurd); this might not be significant, but I felt it was worth mentioning > :-) > > 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?
Nicholas: gamin can be configured to use different mechanisms for different filesystems, so gamin can be configured to poll an NFS filesystem instead of using inotify(). Also, gamin supports kqueue() on *BSD. https://people.gnome.org/~veillard/gamin/config.html Cheers, Glenn