Arch Linux

Why gamin will get removed?
And what with other packages? Some of them depend on fam, some on gamin. There are files with the same names in fam and gamin, so they conflict with each other (though gamin is compatible with fam). This should be fixed some way.
Is there a reason that some packages depend on fam and some on gamin? AFAIK gamin is not polls filesystem changes but receives messages about FS changes directly from kernel via kernel newest functions.

A quote from JGC on the forum:
gamin is useless. It was developed to make use of inotify and to get rid of a daemon running as root. Nowadays, both KDE and GNOME utilize native inotify, so using fam/gamin is deprecated. Since gamin does exactly do the same as gnome-vfs and kdelibs can do, it's useless now. When switching to gamin, the thing you loose is network monitoring. gamin doesn't work on NFS for example, where fam does. Gnome picked this up by using inotify for local filesystems and fam for remote (NFS) filesystems.

Ok, now I undarstand. Big thanks!

But what with packages that uses gamin? Should they use fam instead (for consistence)?

I would not bother too much about it, let gamin die naturally ;)

Not quite sure which packages still depend on gamin, but you should be able to build them agains fam via abs if you like ;)
But then again, if you use either gnome or kde, inotify will take care of most jobs (besides changes on network).
Please don't bother the devs with it, as it is not that important.

Ok, so gamin must die! :-)

gamin provides a fam compatibility layer, so fam is privided by gamin too. It's okay to build with gamin, but dependencies should point to fam.
I'm thinking of either removing gamin completely or dropping it somewhere in AUR, as I don't want to support it officially anymore. It isn't unstable software, it's not something we should use officially, so the only place it should be is AUR. gamin is useful for those who want to use it for other purposes than gnome-vfs or kdelibs.