Bug#1008205: gamin: unmaintained upstream
Source: gamin
Version: 0.1.10-5
Severity: important
Tags: upstream wontfix
X-Debbugs-Cc: debian-bsd@lists.debian.org, debian-hurd@lists.debian.org
User: pkg-gnome-maintainers@lists.alioth.debian.org
Usertags: oldlibs unmaintained-upstream
gamin is no longer maintained upstream, and has been moved to the Archive
namespace on GNOME's Gitlab and marked read-only:
https://gitlab.gnome.org/Archive/gamin
If the Debian maintainers of gamin or the Hurd porters intend it to have
a future, then someone will need to take over as its de facto upstream
maintainer. Otherwise, dependent packages should probably move to a less
dead implementation of filesystem monitoring.
On Linux, the kernel-level file monitoring API is inotify, which can
either be used directly, via a cross-platform wrapper like GLib
(GFileMonitor), Qt (QFileSystemWatcher), libuv (uv_fs_event_t), libev
(ev_stat) and so on, or via a Linux/inotify-specific convenience API
like python3-pyinotify.
On the kFreeBSD ports, the kernel-level file monitoring API is kqueue,
which can either be used directly or via a cross-platform wrapper like
the ones mentioned for Linux.
On the Hurd port, according to #885011 there are filesystem server RPCs
available to user-space (see server/gam_hurd_mach_notify.c in gamin,
apaprently).
This report was prompted by a GLib branch that removes fam/gamin support
being merged upstream for GLib 2.73.x, which means that if Hurd users
want it to still have a GFileMonitor backend, they have approximately
6 months to provide one, either in-tree in GLib itself, or out-of-tree in
a separate source package (analogous to the way gvfs and glib-networking
provide backends for other extension points, although not GFileMonitor).
Packages that use gamin:
- apachetop
- codeblocks (codeblocks-contrib)
- courier (courier-imap)
- doodle (doodled)
- gnubiff
- glib2.0 [hurd-any only]
- libsys-gamin-perl
- and possibly some kFreeBSD- and/or Hurd-specific packages
smcv
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