Add configuration options for file watching about connect-assetmanager

[mape]

There is currently a "stale" option that you can trigger that will turn of watchFile, for use in production. In development I don't feel the performance hit of watchFile warrants an extra option.

[sambs]

The stale options sounds useful, I'd missed that.

What I'd like to be able to do is pass watchFile a smaller interval for development purposes. Its frustrating hitting refresh and not being able to see the css change you just applied, and not knowing whether you've mistyped the selector or whether your change hasn't been compiled yet.

[eirikurn]

Uhh, assetmanager doesn't use a timer or a interval to watch and rebuild files. It uses fs.watchFile, which depending on the OS should notify of changes instantly.

It's more likely that the asset compilation itself is taking too much time, do you have large/many assets with complicated processors?

[sambs]

I'm developing on Mac OS 10.6.7 with node version 0.4.7 and connect-assetmanager 0.0.20. With the default option of { interval: 0 } passed to watchFile, after a css change, I can often refresh my browser two or three times before the change shows. Using { interval: 400 } changes always appear upon first refresh

[sambs]

More info on watchFile can be found in this question on Stack Overflow:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4482352/node-js-fs-watchfile-persistent-watch-mechanics

The interval option of fs.watchFile is only relevant on certain operating systems. On Linux watchFile uses inotify and doesn't use the interval parameter.

[eirikurn]

Ahh, I'm sorry, I didn't know watchFile had those options.

I'm quite surprised they don't have good support for instant file events on Mac. I realize mac doesn't have Inotify, but I thought I had seen other api's used as a fallback on other programming platforms. Would think NodeJS to have better Mac support due to developer popularity.