Build errors: undefined: unix.FanotifyInit, etc

[yurivict]

On FreeBSD 12 I am getting this failure:

# github.com/ozeidan/gosearch/internal/fanotify
internal/fanotify/fanotify.go:75:14: undefined: unix.FanotifyInit
internal/fanotify/fanotify.go:81:8: undefined: unix.FanotifyMark
internal/fanotify/fanotify.go:105:15: undefined: unix.FanotifyEventMetadata
internal/fanotify/fanotify.go:126:21: undefined: unix.NewFileHandle
internal/fanotify/fanotify.go:128:14: undefined: unix.OpenByHandleAt
internal/fanotify/fanotify.go:150:16: undefined: unix.IN_CREATE
internal/fanotify/fanotify.go:151:14: undefined: unix.IN_MOVED_TO
internal/fanotify/fanotify.go:154:16: undefined: unix.IN_DELETE
internal/fanotify/fanotify.go:155:14: undefined: unix.IN_MOVED_FROM
internal/fanotify/fanotify.go:169:10: undefined: unix.IN_ACCESS
internal/fanotify/fanotify.go:169:10: too many errors

[ozeidan]

I didn't think about FreeBSD at all when creating this program. Does FreeBSD have some mechanism that send file creation/deletion events?

[yurivict]

Does FreeBSD have some mechanism that send file creation/deletion events?

What do you mean by this? Where are events sent?

(most of the linux functionality works on FreeBSD)

[ozeidan]

gosearch uses the fanotify system of the Linux kernel to listen to file change events. Whenever a file is either created or deleted, it is add/removed from the index that gosearch maintains to provide fast search results.

The required capabilities of the fanoitfy system were only mainlined in kernel version 5.1 and it seems to me that fanotify/inotify are exclusive to linux. If there is some similar mechanism in FreeBSD, it would be possible to implement FreeBSD support by providing an implementation of the fanotify package for FreeBSD systems. But until then, building for FreeBSD will fail.

[yurivict]

Linux's fanotify interface is based on their inotify kernel API. There is a FreeBSD equivalent:

$ pkg search inotify
inotify-tools-3.20.1           Command-line utilities to watch for file events
libinotify-20180201_1          Kevent based inotify compatible library

libinotify does about the same that inotify does through the library.