If gnome-vfs is compiled with FAM support but the file monitor isn't launched on startup, something really nasty can happen: Your log files will reach titanic dimensions within short time. Main content of those files: "FAMOpen failed, FAMErrno=0". This behaviour is disastrious in two ways: 1) Breaking FAM causes gnome-vfs clients like Nautilus to start a marvilious deny of service attack, flooding the user's hard disk with meaningless messages within short time. 2) As meantioned already: The message is meaningless - causing the user to tap in the dark, when trying to resolve the problem. Attached you'll find a patch addressing both problems: The new error message contains some words about what's going wrong and message generation is throttled. I believe it's ok to throttle this message, since the message doesn't address a specific, but a system error. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: The bug also is filed in GNOME's bugzilla: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=108063
Created attachment 9236 [details, diff] A patch for the issue Going to create a new ebuild file now.
hmm well afaik these messages only turned up like a few times with every app, maybe some more with nautilus. But i've never seen it causing .gnomerc-errors growing out of proportions (altough i did see other things do that). But i think this message already got removed in gnome-vfs-2.2.2 and up, so this should pretty soon be history.
> But i think this message already got removed In 2.2.2 teuf added an "#ifdef DEBUG". Suboptimal for Gentoo: Due Gentoo's don't-activate-init-scripts-on-install policy -- which is a good policy, IMHO -- you have no chance to realize something's wrong, without that message. Well, of course gnome-vfs's .ebuild produces a message informing you about the need to activate fam... Well... But who reads the zillions of messages generated by a three-day-Gentoo-installation-party? Gave teuf a less bloated patch: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/showattachment.cgi?attach_id=14929 There are some chances that he'll merge it. > But i've never seen it causing .gnomerc-errors growing out Trust me. It really were three GByte. My little sister's version still reached 800 MByte...
well, most people don't run gnome stuff from a term or even know about .gnomerc-errors , so leaving it there as a 'something's missing' messages doesn't do much i think and since the message is gone in the current gnome-vfs, the .gnomerc-error won't eat all diskspace anymore because of it. But you do have a point about people not being aware that fam needs to be running, we could put the warning message at the end of the gnome-meta ebuild and mention it in the installtion doc on the site somewhere. Sounds like a reasonable solution to you ? Anyway, i know those messages right now are maybe a quick scroll-by in a large install but there are plans to log them for later review.