Comment 23 for bug 882147

Excerpts from Mike Mestnik's message of 2013-01-06 16:06:49 UTC:
> Why bother with inotify: The is the huge problem with community driven
> software. Performance is always given the right of way, stability and
> usefulness are not universally considered important.
>
> If there is a *single situation where a feature doesn’t function then
> every application that makes use of this feature needs to either exit
> with error or handle a warning. This bug is about "When using tail on
> the liveCD some updates are not reported.", not about the lack of
> inotify support. The lack of inotify is a different bug, the issue here
> is that this one software package doesn’t appropriately handle cases
> were inotify doesn’t function as it should.
>
> I've no problems with an application that makes use of inotify, I've an
> issue with applications expect inotify to always be available even on
> Overlwayfs/3.0.0-12-generic.

Its not that inotify is missing, its that overlayfs is falsely claiming
that inotify works. Applications which implement inotify can fall back
to polling, *if* the inotify calls fail.. which they do not on overlayfs.

So you see, the bug is already fixed in tail, but it is well and truly
broken in overlayfs.