[kragen]

This is very timely!

Linux still doesn't have a networked file watching protocol, does it? Like SGI fam, which gamin is based on. I understand SMB/CIFS supports this in the protocol, but Linux clients don't, and I don't remember if Samba does as a server.

inotify is still an ugly and error-prone interface but it does basically work.

What does the situation look like on other free OSes?

A common related requirement is to access a given version of a file, for example so that you know it's consistent with itself. Linux does support so-called "reflinks" for this... but ext4 doesn't. Sad trombone.