What does rb-fsevent do?

Question

Recently updated Ruby on OSX Lion from 1.8.7 to 1.9.3. In the process I lost the Ruby Gems that were installed on 1.8.7 so attempted to reinstall them.

Came across the rb-fsevent Gem. The docs say:

FSEvents API with Signals catching (without RubyCocoa)

What exactly does it do?

None of the other Gems are dependent upon it. So I'm wondering whether I need to install it on 1.9.3?

Answer 1

rb-fsevent is an efficient file system polling solution for OSX. It uses OSX's underlying "fsevent" api to listen for file system events (updated files, etc) and then does something once that happens. Less wear/tear on your hard drive and less CPU intensive than other solutions that crawl your filesystem looking for updated files.

A lot of gems don't depend on it, but will use it if it's installed...