Re: inotify to minimize stat() calls

Ramkumar Ramachandra wrote:

What about getting systemd to watch everything for us?

systemd is the perfect candidate!  It already has an inotify watcher:
see systemd.path(5).  Can't be used as-is because it spawns processes
on events, which is a non-scalable design.  Secondly, it uses static
.path files to define the rules which is no good for us.  So, we need
to add an API to it, and ask it to report events over IP sockets.  The
API part is simple too, because it already has a DBUS API for many
things [1]; it's just a matter of extending it.

Yes, I know.  This introduces dbus as an additional optional
non-portable dependency.  Do you have suggestions for alternatives
that aren't complicated?

[1]: http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/dbus