I made the MountWatcher only use dbus if it sees a client connected to dbus that it knows will send mount events, or if it can start up such a client via dbus. (Fancy!) Otherwise it falls back to polling. This should be enough to support users who manually mount things -- if they have gvfs installed, it'll be used to detect their manual mounts, even when a desktop is not running, and if they don't have gvfs, they get polling.

Also, I got the MountWatcher to work with KDE. Found a dbus event that's emitted when KDE mounts a drive, and this is also used. If anyone with some other desktop environment wants me to add support for it, and it uses dbus, it should be easy: Run dbus-monitor, plug in a drive, get it mounted, and send me a transcript.

Of course, it'd also be nice to support anything similar on OSX that can provide mount event notifications. Not a priority though, since the polling code will work.

Some OS X fixes today..

  • Jimmy pointed out that my getmntent code broke the build on OSX again. Sorry about that.. I keep thinking Unix portability nightmares are a 80's thing, not a 2010's thing. Anyway, adapted a lot of hackish C code to emulate getmntent on BSD systems, and it seems to work. (I actually think the BSD interface to this is saner than Linux's, but I'd rather have either one than both, sigh..)
  • Kqueue was blocking all the threads on OSX. This is fixed, and the assistant seems to be working on OSX again.

I put together a preliminary page thanking everyone who contributed to the git-annex Kickstarter. thanks The wall-o-names is scary crazy humbling.

Improved --debug mode for the assistant, now every thread says whenever it's doing anything interesting, and also there are timestamps.

Had been meaning to get on with syncing to drives when they're mounted, but got sidetracked with the above. Maybe tomorrow. I did think through it in some detail as I was waking up this morning, and think I have a pretty good handle on it.