I'd like my application to be able to show a directory listing from a remote FTP (or SFTP etc) location. When a file/directory changes in the remote directory tree, the application should update its view with the relevant changes.
Because traversing the entire tree is slow and wasteful, I'd like to use something along the lines of FSEvents (inotify/kqueues on Linux), but obviously these libraries are filesystem-based, and a connection to an FTP server is not the same as a mounted filesystem.
In order to make these libraries work, I'd need to actually mount a filesystem backed by FTP/SFTP on the local machine, then attach an FSEventStream (or kqueue etc) to this local mount. I know FUSE can do this, but is there any way I can use FUSE without the user having to first install it? I mean, can I bundle it with my (Mac) application and create mounts without having to put the user through the process of actually running an installer package to copy libfuse and the kernel modules into the system? Does it assume /dev/fuse
exists, or can this live outside the /dev/
path, inside my application directory?
Nice Mac applications are installed with a simple drag & drop and I'd like to keep mine this way if possible. I'm unclear on if it's possible to use libfuse directly (provided the files are included with the app), without installing it in the system paths.
Alternatively, does anyone have any other suggestions for monitoring for changes over FTP, without polling?