[Netatalk-devel] Request For Opinion: Deprecate FCE

[Daniel M. <da...@mi...>]

Dear Netatalk community,

In the ongoing effort of streamlining the codebase, this suggestion might be the most controversial yet:

Would getting rid of FCE (Filesystem Change Events) have an averse impact on your netatalk deployments?
Do you know of anyone who relies on its API or logging for any kind of mission critical feature?

For the uninitiated, FCE is an API that lets you build applications that react on changes to files on the shared volume. Docs here:
https://netatalk.sourceforge.io/3.1/htmldocs/configuration.html#fce

The argument for deprecation is twofold: For one, it's a fairly complex feature with 9 events and 8 dedicated afp.conf options:
https://netatalk.sourceforge.io/3.1/htmldocs/afp.conf.5.html#fceconf

And secondly, it's has long-outstanding bugs such as:
https://github.com/Netatalk/netatalk/issues/122

I'd love to get your opinions on this!

Cheers,
Daniel