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@arp242 arp242 commented Oct 13, 2022

Renaming a watched path is problematic; on inotify we just get a IN_MOVED_SELF event with the old filename and that's it; no more events for you! So if you do:

watch one
mv    one two
echo  asd >two

You still continue to get events for the file "one", even though it's now named "two" (the file descriptor doesn't care about the rename). There is no way we can know the new event as far as I can tell, inotifywait(1) also behaves like this. So instead of continuing in a semi-broken state just remove the watcher, like we do for deletes.

On kqueue and FEN the situation is similar, and we actually already removed watchers on renames.

On Windows this all works nicely; the watch is preserved and the filename is updated. I decided to keep this as-is for now, even though it's inconsistent. We actually fixed the Windows behaviour for the 1.6.0 release in #370 , so people do seem to care about it and use it, and experience with the symlink change in 1.5.0 shows it's better to keep inconsistent behaviour rather than change it. Fixing this up is something for a v2.

Fixes #172
Fixes #503

Renaming a watched path is problematic; on inotify we just get a
IN_MOVED_SELF event with the old filename and that's it; no more events
for you! So if you do:

	watch one
	mv    one two
	cat   asd >two

You still continue to get events for the file "one", even though it's
now named "two" (the file descriptor doesn't care about the rename).
There is no way we can know the new event as far as I can tell,
inotifywait(1) also behaves like this. So instead of continuing in a
semi-broken state just remove the watcher, like we do for deletes.

On kqueue and FEN the situation is similar, and we actually already
removed watchers on renames.

On Windows this all works nicely; the watch is preserved and the
filename is updated. I decided to keep this as-is for now, even though
it's inconsistent. We actually fixed the Windows behaviour for the 1.6.0
release in #370 , so people do seem to care about it and use it, and
experience with the symlink change in 1.5.0 shows it's better to keep
inconsistent behaviour rather than change it. Fixing this up is
something for a v2.

Fixes #172
Fixes #503
@arp242 arp242 requested a review from a team October 13, 2022 22:13
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One nit on a comment.

Between the tests passing and my review, I think we're good.
I do think I have a pretty good handle on the changes you made to the tests, but all the same I'd prefer if someone else with more inotify experience approved too.

That said, if folks are busy, I wouldn't wait an inordinate amount of time for a second review.

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arp242 commented Oct 14, 2022

I'd prefer if someone else with more inotify experience approved too. That said, if folks are busy, I wouldn't wait an inordinate amount of time for a second review.

You're basically the only person regularly doing reviews at the moment, so ... 🙃 Even at $dayjob getting people to review things in a vaguely timely manner has often been a challenge.

My general approach has been "just merge it if I'm fairly confident it's good". People can always comment later, or we can fix things later, or even backout something if need be.

I tend to work on these kind of things in "bursts", e.g. a lot for a week and then nothing for a bit while I do other stuff. I don't really expect people to review >10 PRs in a week for a project like this.

I think I will just stop asking them except for the larger changes like #521 that change the API; technical fixes like this one are easy to prove correct, but API changes and the like are a more subjective matter of taste, and it's good to have some people look at that, which is more important than stuff like this. That would reduce the requests, improving the chance people actually look at it.

@arp242 arp242 merged commit d314f6d into main Oct 14, 2022
@arp242 arp242 deleted the rename-watch branch October 14, 2022 16:34
@shogo82148 shogo82148 mentioned this pull request Mar 6, 2024
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belimawr added a commit to belimawr/fsnotify that referenced this pull request Sep 25, 2024
Release 1.7.0

This version of fsnotify needs Go 1.17.

Additions:

- illumos: add FEN backend to support illumos and Solaris. ([fsnotify#371])

- all: add `NewBufferedWatcher()` to use a buffered channel, which can
  be useful in cases where you can't control the kernel buffer and
  receive a large number of events in bursts. ([fsnotify#550], [fsnotify#572])

- all: add `AddWith()`, which is identical to `Add()` but allows passing
  options. ([fsnotify#521])

- windows: allow setting the ReadDirectoryChangesW() buffer size with
  `fsnotify.WithBufferSize()`; the default of 64K is the highest value
  that works on all platforms and is enough for most purposes, but in
  some cases a highest buffer is needed. ([fsnotify#521])

Changes and fixes:

- inotify: remove watcher if a watched path is renamed ([fsnotify#518])

  After a rename the reported name wasn't updated, or even an empty
  string. Inotify doesn't provide any good facilities to update it, so
  just remove the watcher. This is already how it worked on kqueue and
  FEN.

  On Windows this does work, and remains working.

- windows: don't listen for file attribute changes ([fsnotify#520])

  File attribute changes are sent as `FILE_ACTION_MODIFIED` by the
  Windows API, with no way to see if they're a file write or attribute
  change, so would show up as a fsnotify.Write event. This is never
  useful, and could result in many spurious Write events.

- windows: return `ErrEventOverflow` if the buffer is full ([fsnotify#525])

  Before it would merely return "short read", making it hard to detect
  this error.

- kqueue: make sure events for all files are delivered properly when
  removing a watched directory ([fsnotify#526])

  Previously they would get sent with `""` (empty string) or `"."` as
  the path name.

- kqueue: don't emit spurious Create events for symbolic links ([fsnotify#524])

  The link would get resolved but kqueue would "forget" it already saw
  the link itself, resulting on a Create for every Write event for the
  directory.

- all: return `ErrClosed` on `Add()` when the watcher is closed ([fsnotify#516])

- other: add `Watcher.Errors` and `Watcher.Events` to the no-op
  `Watcher` in `backend_other.go`, making it easier to use on
  unsupported platforms such as WASM, AIX, etc. ([fsnotify#528])

- other: use the `backend_other.go` no-op if the `appengine` build tag
  is set; Google AppEngine forbids usage of the unsafe package so the
  inotify backend won't compile there.

[fsnotify#371]: fsnotify#371
[fsnotify#516]: fsnotify#516
[fsnotify#518]: fsnotify#518
[fsnotify#520]: fsnotify#520
[fsnotify#521]: fsnotify#521
[fsnotify#524]: fsnotify#524
[fsnotify#525]: fsnotify#525
[fsnotify#526]: fsnotify#526
[fsnotify#528]: fsnotify#528
[fsnotify#537]: fsnotify#537
[fsnotify#550]: fsnotify#550
[fsnotify#572]: fsnotify#572
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Rename, and re-Add doesn't work Problem when moving watched directory with inotify

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