Re: autorevert.el

["Eli Zaretskii" <eliz@elta.co.il>]

> Date: Mon, 22 Mar 2004 13:39:08 -0600 (CST)
> From: Luc Teirlinck <teirllm@dms.auburn.edu>
> 
>    I'm at a loss how you arrived at that conclusion, especially since I
>    suggested looking at the size for the benefit of systems that cannot
>    use the time stamp.  Isn't this better than not knowing the directory
>    changed at all?
> 
> But the probability of finding it out this way is close to zero.

Close to zero is still infinitely better than zero.

>    He ment to check it additionally to the mod-time.
>    I.e. if either the mod-time or the size has changed, then the dir
>    has changed.
> 
> Yes, but the size only seems to change after adding or deleting
> approximately 200 files.

That's on GNU/Linux and Unix systems, but not necessarily on others.

> What would seem to happen on MS Windows if we did that would be that,
> normally, directories do not autorevert, so the user believes that
> they never autorevert.  Once in a very blue moon, one huge directory
> suddenly starts autoreverting all the time.  The user wonders what is
> going on.  All of a sudden it stops autoreverting and never
> autoreverts again.

You again assume that DOS and Windows behave like Posix systems; they
don't.  `stat' is not a system call on DOS/Windows, so whoever writes
its emulation for the library could, for example, add the lengths of
all the names of the directory files and use that as the directory's
size.  With such a version of `stat', autorevert will work like it
does on Posix platforms.

> What if I just go ahead and install my patches to autorevert and
> dired?

It's your code, so you may do as you wish.  Thanks for working on it.