Inotify Extension

Author: Bryan O'Sullivan

This extension has been included with Mercurial since version 1.0 It definitely has to be considered experimental

Overview

This extension uses the Linux 2.6 inotify API to make status instantaneous for even very large repositories, by subscribing to the paths in the repository instead of having to check them all at every status command.

Installation and configuration

To enable it, edit your hgrc:

[extensions]
inotify =

You can either enable it for each individual repository you need it in, or globally.

The extension contains both a server and a client component. By default, it will start automatically. To prevent this, edit either your global ~/.hgrc or .hg/hgrc in repositories where you don't want to use inotify:

[inotify]
autostart = False

The server runs in the background as a daemon when started automatically. To start it manually, use the command:

$ hg inserve [-d]

By default, the server output will be lost. You can use the log option to capture the server output:

[inotify]
log = '/tmp/inotify.log'

Obsolete installation instructions (Mercurial older than 1.0)

These instructions apply to older, out-of-tree versions of the inotify extension.

Installation

The inotify extension requires Bryan's python bindings for inotify. You can either install them the normal way (via setup.py) or do an in-place build setup.py build_ext -i, then create a symlink from the inotify directory into the inotify extension directory. For example:

$ hg clone http://hg.kublai.com/python/inotify python-inotify
$ cd python-inotify
$ python setup.py build_ext -i
$ cd ..
$ hg clone http://hg.kublai.com/mercurial/extensions/inotify
$ cd inotify
$ ln -s ../python-inotify/inotify .

The extension should now be ready to use.

Configuration

Configure your .hgrc to enable the extension by adding following lines:

[extensions]
inotify=/path/to/inotify

You can either start up the inotify extension on a repository with hg inserve or have it autostart with the following .hgrc snippet (either global or in the repository .hg/hgrc in which you would like to use inotify:

[inotify]
autostart = true

CategoryExtension