Re: Emacs inotify support?

[Juri Linkov <juri@jurta.org>]

>      - 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.
>
> Mergeable differences can be more than that.  For instance,
> if some files appear and others disappear.
>
> g makes these updates, of course.  But you expect them when you type
> g.  They may surprise you otherwise.
>
> What happens if the file whose line point is on gets renamed?  That
> seems like a mergeable difference, but you might be a bit surprised to
> see the line move to some other position in the buffer.

Most file managers automatically update changed files and that
doesn't surprise users.

> Ultimately the only way to see how good or bad this feature is is to
> try it.  But I think that paying a lot of attention to minimizing the
> bad aspect is crucial to making the good outweigh the bad.
>
>      - 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.
>
> Well, it might be worse, because the very line you are editing may
> disappear!

`auto-revert-mode' takes precautions against this case with the help
of `dired-buffer-stale-p' that defines that dired buffers shouldn't be
reverted when in editing mode.

-- 
Juri Linkov
http://www.jurta.org/emacs/