While the fam backend comes handy for FreeBSD and non-inotify-capable systems (2.4 for instance), forcing it does not look very nice to me. I'd sincerely rather let it just use inotify and not have gamin installed at all. There is already a handy --disable-fam option to ./configure ;)
on a related note, please read bug #207081. So I imagine the logic would be something with USE="fam" and some kernel_linux checks or something. I'm not an expert on what provides this mechanism on each systems so it would be great if someones lists them here.
fam (gamin) allows supporting kqueue on FreeBSD, inotify on modern Linux and dnotify on older Linux, and falls back to polling if everything fails. On the other hand, if one knows he doesn't need fam, I don't think it's a good idea to force fam on him ;)
Still missing a fam USE flag...
fixed.
