FreeBSD port of ConsoleKit

[William Jon McCann]

Hi,

On 8/26/07, Joe Marcus Clarke <marcus at freebsd.org> wrote:
> We have a FreeBSD port of CK in a private git repository.  We will be
> sending patches upstream soon.

Awesome!  Be sure to check recent git because we've made some changes
that should make it easier to support different systems (while adding
Solaris support).

> I have a question, though, about the file monitor code.  The code in CK
> that uses inotify seems very complex.  It's almost like a FAM-lite that
> emits CK events instead of FAM events.  However, the only consumer of
> this code is the TTY idle monitor.  I wanted to add kqueue support, but
> it seems like a wasted effort since kqueue is not as functional as
> inotify; adding the same level of support to CK would require much more
> work.

I don't think it is overly complex.  Yeah, it is only used for the
idle monitor now but I planned on using it to monitor configuration
files (for seats etc).  In fact, I should really be hooking this up as
soon as I can.  In the longer term, I wanted something that would be
relatively easy to convert to using gvfs monitoring when it is ready.

> Therefore, my question is, could the CK monitor code be simplified and
> tailored just to do the file access stuff (i.e. will external consumers
> of CK need this extensive monitoring capability, or can they just use
> FAM on their own)?  Alternatively, could FAM (e.g. gamin) be used
> instead of embedded code to do a similar task?  If we link with FAM, all
> of the heavy lifting is done for us already.

At least on Linux, I don't want to have an external dependency on FAM
or gamin.  But you can probably add a FAM or gamin backend for use on
BSD if you want.  I think gnome-menus has a FAM backend that you may
be able to adapt.

Thanks again for looking into this.

Jon