Bug#981515: kcoreaddons: please replace fam with gamin
On Wed, Mar 03, 2021 at 02:54:58PM -0500, Nicholas D Steeves wrote:
> 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?
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
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