[trws]

An inotify replacement that can work at whole FS level (and doesn’t require root/admin like the existing option) would be amazing. To be honest, I don’t see a reason it would be hard at the whole filesystem or perhaps mount level unless there are security ramifications. Restricting it to a subdirectory might be tricky though.

[o11c]

The problem with notifications is always "deadlocks".

Even without deadlocks it's common to accidentally create a loop that quickly starts using 100% CPU until you kill it. This isn't theoretical, e.g. I ran across it after encountering a program that used `bash -l` to run scripts (fundamentally wrong, but not the bug here), when my `~/.bash_login` happened to touch the part of the filesystem it was watching.

[throwaway127482]

The problems you're describing sound rather niche - I can see how a deadlock or a 100% CPU issue could happen, but the biggest problem in my experience is the resource usage associated with the file watches, at least on Linux.