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Bug#981515: kcoreaddons: please replace fam with gamin



Hi,

Glenn Strauss <gs-debian.org@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?


Regards,
Nicholas

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