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blog for the day

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Joey Hess 2012-06-17 17:24:07 -04:00
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I've been investigating how to make `git annex watch` work on
FreeBSD, and by extension, OSX.
One option is kqueue, which works on both operating systems, and allows
very basic monitoring of file changes. There's also an OSX specific
hfsevents interface.
Kqueue is far from optimal for `git annex watch`, because it provides even
less information than inotify (which didn't really provide everything I
needed, thus the lsof hack). Kqueue doesn't have events for files being
closed, only an event when a file is created. So it will be difficult for
`git annex watch` to know when a file is done being written to and can be
annexed. git annex will probably need to run lsof periodically to check when
recently added files are complete. (hsevents shares this limitation)
Kqueue also doesn't provide specific events when a file or directory is
moved. Indeed, it doesn't provide specific events about what changed at
all. All you get with kqueue is a generic "oh hey, the directory you're
watching changed in some way", and it's up to you to scan it to work out
how. So git annex will probably need to run `git ls-tree --others`
to find changes in the directory tree. This could be expensive with large
trees. (hsevents has per-file events on current versions of OSX)
Despite these warts, I want to try kqueue first, since it's more portable
than hfsevents, and will surely be easier for me to develop support for,
since I don't have direct access to OSX.
So I went to a handy Debian kFreeBSD porter box, and tried some kqueue
stuff to get a feel for it. I got a python program that does basic
directory monitoring with kqueue to work, so I know it's usable there.
Next step was getting kqueue working from Haskell. Should be easy, there's
a Haskell library already. I spent a while trying to get it to work on
Debian kFreeBSD, but ran into a
[problem](https://github.com/hesselink/kqueue/issues/1) that could be
caused by the Debian kFreeBSD being different, or just a bug in the Haskell
library. I didn't want to spend too long shaving this yak; I might install
"real" FreeBSD on a spare laptop and try to get it working there instead.
But for now, I've dropped down to C instead, and have a simple C program
that can monitor a directory with kqueue. Next I'll turn it into a simple
library, which can easily be linked into my Haskell code. The Haskell code
will pass it a set of open directory descriptors, and it'll return the
one that it gets an event on. This is necessary because kqueue doesn't
recurse into subdirectories on its own.
I've generally had good luck with this approach to adding stuff in Haskell;
rather than writing a bit-banging and structure packing low level interface
in Haskell, write it in C, with a simpler interface between C and
Haskell.