[Unison-hackers] unison and inotify principle

[Sylvain Le Gall]

On 05-06-2008, Sylvain Le Gall <sylvain at le-gall.net> wrote:
> On 05-06-2008, Benjamin Pierce <bcpierce at cis.upenn.edu> wrote:
>>> First of all, I have to tell that I don't understand the language  
>>> used to develop unison (OCaml ?). So I will not be able to help is  
>>> this way. But for an external tool, why not ...
>>>
>>> Concerning Sylvain's design, I fully agree. Using a pipe to send  
>>> external notifications to unison should be very efficient (under  
>>> Linux and Windows, at least).
>>
>> What happens if the pipe fills up?
>>
>
> Read/Write on pipe are blocking. If the pipe contains too much data, it
> just freeze the process trying to write on it, until the other end read
> it...
>
> (well you maybe have a buffer, but if the buffer is full, the process
> will freeze). 
>

Forget to say: you can use "Unix.select" or similar polling function to
check if there are data to be readi/write (not very portable though, but
better than nothing).

Unix.select will work on Mac and Linux. It will work on Windows with
OCaml 3.11

Regards,
Sylvain Le Gall