Re: Emacs inotify support?

[Paul R <paul.r.ml@gmail.com>]

On Sat, 12 Sep 2009 12:46:44 -0400, Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> said:
> Would this mean that all changes in the file system would be reflected
> immediately in Dired buffers? That could be a very nice feature. But
> it could also be a pain in the neck to have these changes occur while
> you're moving around in the Dired buffer and making changes.

What kind of changes are you thinking of ? My gut feeling is that dired
would have to face two kind of situation :

 - trivialy mergeable divergence (f.e. you mark a file that gets touched
   externally) : AFAIK, dired already handles this kind of situation
   when you press 'g' while working, so it could do so without
   interupting the user work.
 - unmergeable divergence (f.e. you initiate a rename operation but in
   the meantime the file gets removed) : Dired will have to complain
   that source file is missing, the situation would not be worse with
   instant reflexion than without.

On the other hand, having instant reflexion in dired would be a big
usability improvement for most browsing operations. That could even go
as far as tracking displayed directory path changes, i.e. you browse
a directory A, browse a subdirectory A/B, rename A/B to A/C (from inside
dired A, or from outside Emacs) : dired buffer A/B is magically
refreshed from A/C. The same could be used for file buffers.

-- 
  Paul