[Unison-hackers] unison and inotify principle

[Sylvain Le Gall]

On 08-06-2008, Benjamin Pierce <bcpierce at cis.upenn.edu> wrote:
> Hi Sylvain,
>
>> If the external program work well and is written using OCaml, is there
>> anyway that the program gets included in unison itself after a certain
>> amount of time (6 months working without problems)?
>
> Yes.  If it is written in OCaml in a portable way, then the simplest  
> may be simply to make it be part of Unison (to maintain the current  
> single-executable distribution model).  But I am also open to other  
> models where the notification program is written in another language  
> and not necessarily in a portable way.  At this point, we need to  
> experiment to see what's going to work best.
>

Full ack.

The only thing i would like to underline, is that it should be really
great to have some kind of "driver" model where you can either use an
internal driver (integrated in unison) or an external one (using a
program). The idea is to keep the driver external as long as possible
for testing and then integrate the one that can be integrated.

Concerning "portability", i think it will be really hard. There is no
POSIX way to poll this kind of event (even UNIXes doesn't have the same
way to do this task). It will probably require to write a program per OS
(BSD/Mac OS X/Linux/Win32).

I will probably try to write an inotify program for this. But i need to
finish some other job before ;-)

Regards,
Sylvain Le Gall