Newsgroups: php.internals
Path: news.php.net
Xref: news.php.net php.internals:65848
Mailing-List: contact internals-help@lists.php.net; run by ezmlm
Received-SPF: pass (pb1.pair.com: domain sugarcrm.com designates 67.192.241.193 as permitted sender)
Message-ID: <511D5924.4070602@sugarcrm.com>
Date: Thu, 14 Feb 2013 13:37:40 -0800
Organization: SugarCRM
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; rv:17.0) Gecko/20130107 Thunderbird/17.0.2
MIME-Version: 1.0
To: "ivan.enderlin@hoa-project.net" <ivan.enderlin@hoa-project.net>
CC: PHP internals <internals@lists.php.net>
References: <511CEEB1.7040303@hoa-project.net>
In-Reply-To: <511CEEB1.7040303@hoa-project.net>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] File system watcher/monitoring
From: smalyshev@sugarcrm.com (Stas Malyshev)

Hi!

> A missing feature in PHP is a file system watcher/monitoring available 
> for almost all platforms. On Linux, we have inotify (available in PHP 
> through pecl/inotify), on Mac OS X, we have /dev/fsevents (not available 
> in PHP, since we need ioctl to do that in pure PHP —and sudo—, no C 
> extension needed), on FreeBSD, we have FAM, and on Windows, we have 
> FileSystemWatcher in .NET. All major platforms have a solution ready to use.

I think it'd be great to have a library with unified interface and an
extension that uses it. However, I'm not sure if these libraries are
useful in common php use case - short-lived requests. Could I get the
changes since the last request? Or is it useful only for long-running
persistent processes?

> Is it possible to have such a feature landing in PHP (core if karma 
> allows it)? or do you want such a feature?

I'm not sure why it has to be in core though. I don't see so far
anything that requires modifying language core.

-- 
Stanislav Malyshev, Software Architect
SugarCRM: http://www.sugarcrm.com/
(408)454-6900 ext. 227