Comment 9 for bug 882147

Well, inotify is great and all. However features like this simply won't always exist or always work properly. A good case in point is locking over NFS.

Thus dpkg or the install scripts need a hook for every file that needs inotify. This call back should be run after the inotify and it should first detect either by looking for the results of the inotify(possibly best) or test inotify on it's own. If an issue is detected corrective action needs to be taken, likely via a call back.

Yes, that's right... "Why bother with inotify."

inotify for updates is a poor choice because updates are not done 100 or even 1000s of times per day, so the performance loss of sending a signal(kill -HUP) is preferred over a system that sometimes doesn't work.

However inotify can be useful in fast-paths, that's what it's good for. Start using the right tool for the job.