Thoughts on including a directory tree / file watcher?

[jprichardson]

Probably this one... https://github.com/mikeal/watch

[davidbourguignon]

@jprichardson @mikeal Including a directory tree watcher in fs-extra makes sense, indeed! For more details, see my comment on the issue related to the walker.

[jprichardson]

I want to do this, but there are so many. I'm not sure which is the best.

[mikeal]

watch is probably the most used but i'm not sure about best. the problem is harder than it looks and while watch has the benefit of a couple years worth of bug fixes, it was written early in node's history and doesn't follow some of the best patterns we came to later on in the community so I wouldn't be surprised if someone has written a better one by now.

[jprichardson]

@mikeal Do you see any problems with this one: https://github.com/paulmillr/chokidar?

[mikeal]

@jprichardson it's in coffeescript...

[jprichardson]

Ya, that bothers me too.

[cadorn]

don't include a directory tree watcher. I like that this lib provides a more advanced FS API but uses common FS primitives to do so. file watching is still an evolving science (especially when dealing with many directories/files).

I am strongly against including a file watcher. Such features should go into fs-util or something like that which would sit on top of fs-extra.

[cadorn]

I have an interest in keeping the fs-extra API portable to other implementations and languages.

[jprichardson]

For the time being, I see no reason to include file watching into fs-extra. chokidar is pretty damn good and fortunately, not written in CoffeeScript anymore. Chokidar is now the recommendation.