Git: File events don't work if .git is outside the opened folder

[warpdesign]

• VSCode Version: latest insider
• OS Version: Windows 10 x64

The following bug only seems to happen when two folders belonging to the same parent git repository are added to the workspace. For example, here myApp is the repository:

myApp/
myApp/.git
myApp/foo
myApp/foo/test.js
myApp/bar
myApp/bar/test.js

Steps to Reproduce:

1. open an empty VSCode window
2. add the foo folder to the workspace
3. add the bar folder to the workspace
4. open one of the test.js file
5. open the integrated terminal and type git checkout -b new_branch

What happens?
The branch sticks to master in the bottom left corner of vscode.

Note: Exiting VSCode and opening the previous workspace will correctly show the new_branch as current branch.

Reproduces without extensions: Yes

edit:
Problem also happens with macOS High Sierra. See my last comment.

[warpdesign]

I looked at the git extension source code and noticed in extensions/git/repository.ts that the onFSChange() callback isn't executed in my case after running git checkout new_branch.

This explains why the status is never updated.

[warpdesign]

Question: couldn't the problem simply be that the fileSystemWatcher only listens for file changes inside the workspace (ie: in this example, only in myApp/bar and myApp/foo)?

If I create and switch to a new branch with checkout -b new_branch, no files would change inside the workspace (only inside the .git which isn't inside the workspace so is not tracked), the fsWatcher wouldn't trigger any change, and so the git's branch isn't updated in the statusBar.

Now, most of the time, switching branches will change at least one file inside the workspace, but not when creating new branch, so this would explain why it works in most cases.

[warpdesign]

I now know how to easily reproduce it, with the following folder structure:

myApp
myApp/foo
myApp/.git

Opening the myApp/foo folder is enough to trigger the problem.

In this case VSCode will detect the git repository found in foo's parent directory but will only listen for file changes inside the myApp/foo folder.

Creating a new branch, or changing a branch with no changes (eg. git checkout -b new_branch) won't make any file modifications inside myApp/foo folder, so won't trigger status update of the git branch.

[joaomoreno]

Yup.

@jrieken @bpasero This happens because the .git folder is up the directory chain and outside the workspace. The git extensions gets no file events within it. This was working fine when I was using fs.watch, and stopped working as soon as I moved to workspace.createFileSystemWatcher. Have you guys considered providing a file system watcher creator function which lets me pick any root?

[jrieken]

Exposing this in the API is easy ;-)

[bpasero]

@joaomoreno not easy without a reliable watcher, but we have #3025 for it already.

[joaomoreno]

Well this is really just a duplicate of #3025, which I failed to find in my search efforts.

[vscodebot]

Thanks for creating this issue! We figured it's covering the same as another one we already have. Thus, we closed this one as a duplicate. You can search for existing issues here. See also our issue reporting guidelines.

Happy Coding!