Support for manually refreshing projects when inotify/fsevents unavailable (e.g. on nfs file shares)

[kscott-1]

Check for existing issues

• Completed

Describe the bug / provide steps to reproduce it

Within a pre-existing git repository locally cloned on remote machine, running git pull will not populate the dock with any new folders created from the pull.

Environment

Local-
Zed: v0.159.6 (Zed)
OS: macOS 15.1.0
Memory: 36 GiB
Architecture: aarch64

Remote-
OS: Rocky 8.8 / Linux 4.18.0-477.10.1
Architecture: x86-64

If applicable, add mockups / screenshots to help explain present your vision of the feature

No response

If applicable, attach your Zed.log file to this issue.

No response

[notpeter]

When this happens is there anything notable in your local logs (cmd-shift-p, 'zed: logs') or in your remote logs (server-workspace-*.log under ~/.local/share/zed/logs)?

Also:

grep -H ''  /proc/sys/fs/inotify/max_user_watches
cat /proc/self/limits | grep 'Max open files'

[kscott-1]

When this happens is there anything notable in your local logs (cmd-shift-p, 'zed: logs') or in your remote logs (server-workspace-*.log under ~/.local/share/zed/logs)?

Nothing appeared in the logs when I looked through. I can try to reproduce the bug when I have a chance.

grep -H ''  /proc/sys/fs/inotify/max_user_watches
cat /proc/self/limits | grep 'Max open files'

max_user_watches:975744
soft:1024 hard:262144

[mati865]

Is your project on a remote machine stored on a local file system or a networked one, like NFS?

[kscott-1]

Is your project on a remote machine stored on a local file system or a networked one, like NFS?

NFS file system

[mati865]

This is the culprit, as I suppose you are mounting it and hosting it on a different machine.
Inotify is a kernel mechanism, so it works correctly only on the host of the filesystem.

I mean if you open the project in any IDE (Zed, JetBrains, Atom, VS Code, etc.) that is located on NFS from within the host of the file system, it will work correctly. However, if you mount the same file system on another machine (let's call it a client), Inotify won't work. This is because the client kernel doesn't perform write operations, and instead the requests are sent via network to the host of the filesystem.

[notpeter]

Without support for inotify (Linux) or FSEvents (Mac) there is currently no way for Zed to be notified of changes. Thus Zed would need to periodically poll the entire project tree to identify if anything has changed (as well as maintain a cache of file inodes to make it possible to detect those changes).