Investigate filewatcher edge cases (appimage, wsl, etc.)

[ndom91]

Version

0.12.20

Operating System

Linux

Distribution Method

AppImage (Linux)

Describe the issue

Edge cases:

1. WSL, see: https://github.com/gitbutlerapp/gitbutler/issues/4953
2. AppImage:

When running GitButler via the AppImage, the file watcher sometimes does not work as expected. I then have to reload (Ctrl + R) the application to pick up changes.

I can't quite pin down how to reproduce this consistently, but i have noticed this tends to start to happen after the application has been open for a while.

Running inotifywait -m package.json, for example, to monitor and print inotify events on the package.json file shows that MODIFY events are fired as expected when writing to package.json, but GitButler running simultaneously via the AppImage doesn't display any modified files in my default branch.

How to reproduce

No response

Expected behavior

No response

Relevant log output

No response

[mtsgrd]

Would you be able to check if e.g. modifying package.json generates any activity whatsoever? I would let it idle for a bit, then tail -f -n 0 on the log file, and save the change.

[ndom91]

There's another edge case with WSL2 users here.

In that thread, @Byron had an interesting idea to test disk events ourselves on startup and if we don't get them, fallback to polling for example, more details.