Re: Bug#410929: Request binNMU for pcmanfm

[Michael Banck <mbanck@debian.org>]

Hi,

I've upgraded this bug to `serious', but see below.

On Tue, Mar 13, 2007 at 02:38:53PM -0700, Steve Langasek wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 13, 2007 at 08:30:58PM +0800, Andrew Lee wrote:
> > Release managers,
> 
> > I wrote this for request binNMU for the packages below:
> > pcmanfm_0.3.2.2-1, Rebuild against newer libgamin-dev >= 0.1.8
> > (Closes:410929), 1, linux-any
> > pcmanfm-nohal_0.3.2.2-1, Rebuild against newer libgamin-dev >= 0.1.8
> > (Closes:410929), 1, any
> 
> I'm not content to do this without understanding what changed in gamin that
> broke your package.  gamin didn't have a /declared/ ABI change, so if this
> is an ABI change in gamin, it's possible that there are other packages
> affected and we may need to do a mass-fix.  But we can't easily do that
> without first understanding the nature of the problem.

pcmanfm seems to use the FAM compatibility layer of gamin, not the gamin
API directly, so I don't think API-breakage is likely.

I tried to investigate this, but could not find a sign of API problems.

Also, I tried to reproduce, and while I initially thought I had it
reproduced (and thus tagged the bug `confirmed'), I can no longer now.

What I see is that by going from 0.1.7 to 0.1.8, the monitoring is much
more sluggish, and if I touch a file in an otherwise empty diretory,
pcmanfm does not promptly diplay the new file.  If I touch a second file
though, both files get displayed, and rm also works (with some delay).

Rebuilding pcmanfm against gamin-0.1.8 did not visibly improve things
for me, monitoring was still pretty sluggish.

So can you please try to recheck that monitoring is really broken and
not just sluggish?  I guess that the move to 0.1.7 has made gamin use
the poll backend instead of dnotify/inotify for pcmanfm, which makes
things slower.  I have no idea why this is, though.


Michael