Bug#1034122: feh: excessively noisy and unclear if inotify_init() fails

[Michael Gold]

Package: feh
Version: 3.9.1-2
Severity: wishlist

Dear Maintainer,

feh prints some warnings to stderr if inotify_init() fails:
	feh WARNING: inotify_init failed: Too many open files
	feh WARNING: Disabling inotify-based auto-reload

I reported a related crash here:
	https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1034121
But I consider the warnings to be problematic too.

A program shouldn't print a warning relating to an optional feature that
I did not specifically enable, based on a function that must be expected
to "randomly" fail (due to its reliance on an extremely limited resource
shared with unrelated programs: by default, each user has a limit of 128
inotify instances).

It is also unclear from the text whether auto-reloading was disabled, or
remains operational via some non-inotify fallback.  The program's manual
page is similarly ambiguous.  I don't see any fallback in the code.

- Michael


-- System Information:
Debian Release: 12.0
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 6.1.0-7-amd64 (SMP w/32 CPU threads; PREEMPT)
Locale: LANG=en_CA.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_CA.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE=en_CA:en
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /usr/bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)
LSM: AppArmor: enabled

Versions of packages feh depends on:
ii  libc6         2.36-8
ii  libcurl4      7.88.1-8
ii  libexif12     0.6.24-1+b1
ii  libimlib2     1.10.0-4+b1
ii  libpng16-16   1.6.39-2
ii  libx11-6      2:1.8.4-2
ii  libxinerama1  2:1.1.4-3
ii  yudit-common  3.1.0-1

Versions of packages feh recommends:
ii  libjpeg-progs  1:9e-1

feh suggests no packages.

-- no debconf information

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