Re: Checking for Modification to a Set of Files

Ben Bacarisse wrote
(in article <pan.2006.03.25.01.02.57.151812@xxxxxxxxx>):

I think partisan feelings are getting in the way of the facts here.

Maybe, but I don't think that discussing portable over
proprietary (or at least minimally portable) solutions is
partisan. I'm trying to figure out how a post listing off quite
a few platforms could be "partisan" anyway. I did't ask for a
solution to a single OS (such as Windows) which in fact would be
partisan.

I spent way too many years making code work cross-platform to
stop worrying about it now just because a few million lemmings
follow the mantra de jour coming out of Redmond.

FWIW, I used DOS and Windows as the primary development platform
for many years, and even so I didn't take the "easy" route if
alternatives were available.

For any sufficiently diverse set of systems, a portable solution
will be hard to write

I guess that all depends upon how you define "sufficiently
diverse", yet I don't find this particular problem to very
difficult at all to achieve portably.

and will probably have to use methods that are inferior to asking
the host system for file modification events (as others have
pointed out).

Inferior is a question of point of view. Despite the common
mantra of the newly minted CS grads that everything in the
universe is about performance, in the real world, you need to
understand that if it isn't a bottleneck, then it it isn't a
problem. They've also probably never been asked to spend hours
or days porting a bunch of "high-performance" (cough)
platform-specific code to multiple platforms, or they'd have a
better understanding of that already.

For all its faults, .NET is supposed to provide a unified API for
services such as these, and implementations (some of them open) are
available for: Linux, Mac OS X, Solaris, BSD (Open, Free and Net
flavours) as well as... Microsoft Windows.

And it works identically and equally well on all of them? I
doubt it.

You may be out of luck with Novell's NetWare, but given their interest
in Mono (the open-source .NET port) you never know.

Or, I could use something else that worked yesterday, works
today, and will work 10 years from now.

Mono supports the FileSystemWatcher interface so if all the OP needs is a
solution that runs on Windows, Linux, OS X, Solaris and BSD then it is a
pretty good choice. I don't like it but, that is the how it is!

If you don't like it, why should I? :-)

Can you post a link to the free download for OS X please?

http://www.mono-project.com/Mono:OSX

"This page describes some of the differencies and idiosyncrasies
of Mono on MacOS X..."

Well, I'm not sure if "differencies" is supposed to be
differences, deficiencies, or some combination of the two, but
either way, that's all I need to know for now. Thanks anyway.


--
Randy Howard (2reply remove FOOBAR)
"The power of accurate observation is called cynicism by those
who have not got it." - George Bernard Shaw





.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Web Application Testers.
    ... > automatically alerts you to the latest security vulnerabilities please see: ... Platforms: ... A Windows/MS-DOS CGI scanner which scans for 65 remote ... Windows 2000 and Windows NT ...
    (Vuln-Dev)
  • Re: Web Application Testers.
    ... > automatically alerts you to the latest security vulnerabilities please see: ... Platforms: ... A Windows/MS-DOS CGI scanner which scans for 65 remote ... Windows 2000 and Windows NT ...
    (Pen-Test)
  • Re: truncating text fields
    ... I'll take a look at the font issue again, but as I said before, I don't have any problems rendering 6 pt Times New Roman in other software, so I don't think it is a system configuration or font problem. ... Though I think to a large extent the reason why Java has failed as a UI vehicle is because users of different platforms are not as concerned with seeing the exact pixel-for-pixel representation of the same UI on different platforms, as they are with having the UI work as expected on their chosen platform. ... That being said, if it comes between having a less than optimal FM on Windows vs. no version at all, I would obviously take the former. ... I can understand why a hard-core developer might feel a little constrained by FileMaker Pro. ...
    (comp.databases.filemaker)
  • Re: Socket.Disconnect Method
    ... method that only worked on platforms prior to Windows ... method is supported on Windows 2000 and Windows 98, ... An error occurred when attempting to access the socket. ... It looks to me like the underlying error code could have been: ...
    (microsoft.public.vsnet.general)
  • Re: OT Bill Gates tells senators "we need more foreign programmers to remain competitive"
    ... There have always been other platforms, and platforms MS was not involved with because it isn't their business. ... The reason that's what consumers see is the main consumer item has been desktop PCs. ... Is Windows going to dominate them ... Which 'heap'? ...
    (alt.comp.hardware.pc-homebuilt)