Bugzilla – Bug 105153
change fam heuristics in YaST
Last modified: 2005-08-18 15:44:06 UTC
I have just submitted gnome-vfs2 change and it does not require fam daemon running for local file systems. It should imply heuristic change. Current state: If user selects GNOME, fam is started by default. Proposed state and proposed texts: Do not start FAM by default. Add following question to NFS (SMB, AFS,...) clients, if GNOME or KDE is installed: Do you want to turn on remote file alteration monitor (FAM) support? Please note that it will only work, if server supports it, too. Add following question to NFS (SMB, AFS,...) clients: To support file alteration monitor (FAM) on your clients, you need to install/start fam daemon. Do you want to start it by default? Note: Opening FAM ports on firewall may be required. Please consult it with Adrian, he can say more about it.
Very late, we have feature and text freeze.
The question is likely only to confuse users. What is FAM good for? Why turn it on? Why not turn it on? Why should the heuristic change anyway? The dist meeting minutes do not say why (http://mailman.suse.de/mlarch//SuSE/results/2005/results.2005.08/msg00014.html).
-> aj, adrian
Original heuristic was needed for GNOME, which was not able to notify local file changes without running fam. Now it will select gamin in this case, so running fam by default is not needed. But for network notification it is. You may want to rephrase it: FAM is File Alteration Monitor. It allows to notify desktop environment on file changes. It is especially useful for home-over-NFS environment, less useful for nearly static data exported from somewhere. Why not to run it? - If you don't want to support notify or in case of paranoid security requirements. Why this dialog is useful? Because admin can not know the connection about lack of change notification on desktops and running fam on both server and desktop.
We can disable starting of fam now also for Gnome. We should not mix a Gnome workaround with an administrator feature. If we want it as this, it should become not dependend on Gnome. So this is the wrong place. Sorry, we cannot make this change anymore in YaST. Please make a feature request for 10.1 instead.
OK, also I will modify the control file in order not to touch sysconfig/fam at all (we modified the FAM_LOCAL_ONLY variable there) and not to start it by default at all. What about netdaemon? It is the same trash in YaST code, desktop-specific daemon (for GNOME) which needs to run with root permissions...
i guess netdaemon behaviour cannot be changed right now.,
Leave netdaemon.
OK, just not touching FAM configuration at all. control file submitted.