New subject: Fw: Re: Filesystem change notifications

14 Nov 2002


      On Thu, Nov 14, 2002 at 07:04:24AM +0000, Keith Matthews wrote:
...
It sems to have been dropped in RH 7.3 which is a good thing.
No, it's not dropped.
...
Fam requires portmapper. If not set up properly (i.e. by someone who
understands what they are letting loose) portmapper can be a serious
security problem. The security community regard the introduction of fam
a serious backward step on RH's part.
Sounds like someone is misinformed, because we don't have it listening
on external ports. That's only required to make it work over NFS or
something. Our FAM is a local-only thing unlike on Irix.
...
You are also assuming that every distro follows RH's lead which is very
definitely not true. Many people are already getting upset about the
number of libraries that are required to get some packages to run.
GNUCash being a prime example of package use gone mad.
GNUCash has something like 40 dependencies including a lot of very
unstable/unfinished APIs. FAM is 1 dependency and while it sucks, it
doesn't change very often (or at all that I know of).
Alex Larsson wanted to work on a nicer FAM-type thing based on a
per-user daemon or something, but hasn't had time. Certainly there's
room to write such a thing, but I don't think it's harmful to use FAM
if FAM is present.
It's not like a FAM dependency would be pervasive, it would be small
and well-isolated and easy to change to some other dependency if you
found something better.
Havoc

Re: Fw: Re: Filesystem change notifications