incron vs. files of uncertain existence

I've got two related issues here, really. :)

I) Currently, if a path defined in an incrontab doesn't exist, it's just
ignored. Would it be possible to have a flag (X_IN_MIGHT_NOT_EXIST) which
would cause the following behavior?

  1) if path to watch exists, act normally
  2) if it doesn't exist, set up a watch for the parent directory
     (recursively up to /, if necessary) which would look for the original
     path to be created and at that point
        a) delete the impled parent-directory watches
        b) add the original watch as given in the config file.

I can think of a rather complicated scheme using the existing system and
some scripting to recreate this behavior (basically, self-modifying
incrontabs -- ugh), but it seems like a common enough use case that having
it dealt with in the main program would be more graceful.

II) I was trying to make a script which acted on changes to /etc/group. To
my initial puzzlement, the watch would fire once and then be lost. I quickly
realised: oh yeah, the origial file is being backed up, then a whole new one
overwrites it. This is causing the watch to get silently lost.

I worked around this by using "IN_CLOSE_WRITE,IN_ONESHOT" and then touching
my incrontab (it's in /etc/incron.d; could use --reload for personal
incrontabs, of course), forcing it to reload.

This works, but it seems like there's got to be a more elegant way. Would it
be possible to encapsulate a similar behavior into incrond itself? Again,
this seems like a pretty common case.

As a note to the above: if I don't use IN_ONESHOT, this results in

 incrond[19715]: system table rootalias-manager.incron changed, reloading
 incrond[19715]: *** unhandled exception occurred ***
 incrond[19715]: void Inotify::Remove(InotifyWatch*): removing watch failed
 incrond[19715]: error: (22) Invalid argument

and incrond dies. Oops.

Anyway, very useful program -- thanks!

-- 
Matthew Miller           blocked-address          <http://mattdm.org/>
Boston University Linux      ------>              <http://linux.bu.edu/>