Re: famd and mount

["Marcelo E. Magallon" <mmagallo@debian.org>]

 > Without it, nautilus won't refresh automatically directories where
 > files change, and, more annoying the panel won't refresh the menus.
 > There are other little things that won't work, but it's perfectly
 > safe to remove it.

 Which is the reason why fam is keeping an eye on /mnt/floppy for
 example.  Because nautilus told it to do so.  I don't use Nautilus
 here, and I have never had a problem with fam.

       4.     When  the application is through monitoring a file or
              directory, it should call FAMCancelMonitor.  If the
              application wants  to temporarily  suspend  monitoring  of
              a file or directory, it may call FAMSuspendMonitor.  When
              the application is ready to  start monitoring again, it
              calls FAMResumeMonitor.

 Without actually having looked neither at fam nor nautilus code, *I'd*
 think the problem is Nautilus, not fam.  The stupid thing is, you need
 to use nautilus to unmount devices, because Nautilus is the one who
 told fam to monitor something in the first place.  I've never seen this
 problem on IRIX, which is why I think the problem is not with fam
 itself.  Look:

 $ mount /cdrom/
 $ ./test -d /cdrom # this is the text application shipped with libfam-dev
 lots of output... background this thing
 $ umount /cdrom/
 umount: /cdrom: device is busy
 umount: /cdrom: device is busy

 foreground test again and kill it (^C)

 DIR  /cdrom:   /cdrom EndExist
 Interupted!
 $ umount /cdrom/

 and /cdrom is unmounted.

 AFAIK there's no way for fam to know that the user wants to unmount the
 media.  And the configuration file doesn't let you tell it not to
 monitor something in particular.  I have no idea how IRIX manages this
 situation.

 What I find irritating is that it's not possible to ask fam what is it
 monitoring and why or how to tell it to stop doing so:

       When fam is called on to monitor a file, it passes back a
       FAMRequest structure.   This structure uniquely identifies the
       request so that it may be cancelled, using FAMCancelMonitor or
       suspended, using FAMSuspendMonitor.

 fam is not as bad as some people here seem to think.  It's much more
 efficient than just wildly poll directories.

 Marcelo