Hm,
Inotify is a system provided by the kernel (imo 2.6 only) You can say
"notify my if file X changed" (and a lot more things are possible, but
not interesting in here).
So if you open an svg with linked images. Inkscape sets a callback
function that gets called by inotify if one of the linked raster images
gets changed (though an external program). This function reloads the
images from the harddisk and redraw the scene.
It is interesting, but there are certain issues with inotify. On the other hand, by hooking the callbacks on windows/apps coming forward we could achieve the same net effect by manually checking the "assets" when our app regains attention. Plus that ends up cross-platform.
The portability is an issue.. yes. But i would prefer to use it if available. How often do you like to check the "assets" for changes? I think its hard to find a good value of time between the checks. If you check to often its add to much load to the hard disk (though it should get cached by the os but older systems like windows 98 doesnt do this well and anyway it doesnt sounds like a good solution) but if you check less often like once a minute its not that useful for the user.
Imo its worth implementing it with inotify even if there is another portable system for checking (as "fallback").
Florian