Comment 25 for bug 882147

By that logic if select() is broken in the kernel and does not properly handle its arguments or give proper error codes, my program which expects to get proper error codes from the syscall is broken because it doesn't know how to handle something not working as documented? I'm not sure I agree with that.

tail should be able to trust that if inotify_add_watch() returns with a successful return code, then the directory that was given to the kernel *is watched*. If an error were returned, as it is in other filesystems where inotify does not work, then tail would fall back to polling.