VGvgrichina·Oct 20, 2013
I don't get the point of using FUSE/ramdisk. Why not just use FSEvents/inotify to listen for updates?
See for example https://github.com/ggreer/fsevents-tools
In Show HN: RTE – Bret Victor’s interfaces, the Unix wayggreer
fsevents-tools
C2012–2013
ggreer / fsevents-tools
fsevents-tools
Like inotify-tools but for OS X's FSEvents
2Distinct people
3Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
273GitHub stars
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What it is
Like inotify-tools but for OS X's FSEvents
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Where it is used
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What people are saying
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This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 5:04:57 PM UTC.
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Mentions over time
HN mentions by month3 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2012-09-23 21:06:56 UTC to 2013-10-20 01:11:33 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sep 2012 | 2012-09-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2012-10-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| Oct 2012 | 2012-10-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2012-11-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Nov 2012 | 2012-11-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2012-12-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| Dec 2012 | 2012-12-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Jan 2013 | 2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2013-02-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Feb 2013 | 2013-02-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2013-03-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Mar 2013 | 2013-03-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2013-04-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Apr 2013 | 2013-04-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2013-05-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| May 2013 | 2013-05-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2013-06-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Jun 2013 | 2013-06-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2013-07-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Jul 2013 | 2013-07-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2013-08-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Aug 2013 | 2013-08-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2013-09-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Sep 2013 | 2013-09-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2013-10-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Oct 2013 | 2013-10-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2013-11-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
What Hacker News says
3 sourcesI don't want to toot my own horn, but I only check in Makefile.am and configure.ac. Here's a simple example I made a while back: https://github.com/ggreer/fsevents-tools. To build it, just run autogen.sh.
For a "real" project, https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher, I have the same set-up: Makefile.am and configure.ac with no generated code in the repo. It works fine as long as you have pkg-config, and most people do. It builds and runs on Solaris, OS X, FreeBSD, and any Linux distro you like.
Although I use autotools the "right way", I'm not a fan of it at all. There are multiple levels of generated files. Configure is generated from configure.in which is generated from configure.ac. Makefile is generated from configure and Makefile.in. Makefile.in is generated from Makefile.am. There are other files in the mix as well. Config.h,
Read the rest
config.h.in, aclocal.m4, and various symlinks to autotools (compile, depcomp, install-sh, and missing) get generated. It's insane.
There are other problems. Minor versions of autotools can behave completely differently. AM_SILENT_MAKE was removed between automake 1.10 and 1.11. Instead of printing out minimal text during a build, scripts using that macro crash. Another example: 1.9 requires AM_PROG_CC_C_O to compile anything useful but 1.10 doesn't. What's crazy is that 1.9 actually spits out an error message telling you to add AM_PROG_CC_C_O to your configure.ac. It makes no sense.
A system this complicated can't be pruned without breaking backwards compatibility. For autotools, that's not feasible. There are too many projects that would need to be fixed. The next-best solution is to use something else for new projects and let autotools fade gently into history.
$ brew install inotify-tools
This isn't Linux.
It's too late to save shazow time and stress, but I wrote a notify-wait for OS X: https://github.com/ggreer/fsevents-tools. It's not as fully-featured as inotify-tools (since FSEvents isn't as granular), but it's pretty handy.
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