Request for appimaged to omit directory

[tresf]

A popular hypervisor "VirtualBox" uses /opt/VBoxGuestAdditions-X.X.X on Ubuntu Guests to store information about the VM guest additions, common with each Ubuntu guest running inside a VirtualBox VM. At the time of writing this, this location has several files including 7 subfolders, source code and two desktop files.

Running appimaged in verbose mode shows many failed attempts to scan and recognize files in this directory.

From what I understand this is due to the monitoring of the /opt directory. I propose to omit/blacklist directories starting with /opt/VBoxGuestAdditions- to prevent common unwanted entries in the output log when daemon is initially launched.

Does such a blacklisted location already exist within the tool?

[probonopd]

Relevant code is here so it would be easy to comment out /opt in your own builds, but no, there is no blacklist mechanism yet. PR would be appreciated though.

[TheAssassin]

Blacklisting doesn't solve the problems of the world. I don't see the reason to monitor /opt anyway. How often is this directory used for AppImages? I think we can just get rid of it completely.

[tresf]

There is no blacklist mechanism yet.

It appears inotifytools_watch_recursively would have to be replaced with inotifytools_watch_recursively_with_exclude.

[probonopd]

Yes, inotifytools_watch_recursively_with_exclude looks like it @tresf.
/opt is a good option imho for system-wide AppImages, @TheAssassin.

[probonopd]

@tresf I would be happy to accept a PR

[tresf]

@tresf I would be happy to accept a PR

Apparently, inotifytools_watch_recursively_with_exclude assumes the exclude list is a listing of valid directories and the original bug report is a request to blacklist a directory pattern. This makes the request not possible with the built-in tools unless the utility first built this list dynamically at runtime based on some pattern searching, which is gross.

I'm afraid this may be a wontfix feature and just turn into a verbosity preference. The tool doesn't treat this folder incorrectly and there are hundreds (thousands?) of other commonly installed /opt locations that too would recurse into this location.

[TheAssassin]

@tresf one can always create a separate file for these kinds of features. You are hereby invited to send in a patch as proposal, we can then discuss the details.

[tresf]

I'm not a stakeholder in this feature, it was simply a cosmetic observation while debugging #430. I won't be working on this.

[TheAssassin]

All right, thanks for the suggestion then, I'll leave this open as a feature proposal.

[azubieta]

Please transfer to the appimaged repo.

[TheAssassin]

You can send me a list of links of stuff to move via IRC, too, that won't generate as much spam.

[probonopd]

We should follow #30, "What triggers system integration".