I recently did some work to rewrite the Catalyst restarter code and make
it both simpler and less fragile.
The restarter no longer attempts to reload changed modules in an existing
process. This was fragile, and tended to produce a lot of bogus
compilation failures.
The new restarter just _tries_ to restart on every change. If the restart
fails, the server dies, rather than continuing to run with the old code.
However, the restarter keeps watching for changes, and will attempt to
start the server on the next change.
I think this makes for a much saner development process. I always found it
very confusing to make a change, reload a web page, and not see the change
reflected, only to realize that the server didn't actually reload.
Restarting is also much faster. All of the Catalyst core code is preloaded
in a parent process, and the server runs in a child. That means that when
the child is killed and a new child spawned for a new server, it does not
need to load all that Catalyst code again, just your application.
The new restarter has been moved from Catalyst-Runtime, where it lived as
a weird bastardized Engine subclass, to Catalyst-Devel, where it lives as
a standalone Catalyst::Restarter module.
I also switched the actual file monitoring away from the existing
File::Modified implementation. The new implementation uses a new module I
wrote called File::ChangeNotify. This module is much better suited to
Catalyst's needs, as it simply reports on relevant filesystem changes.
File::ChangeNotify is designed so that it is easy to implement per-OS
subclasses to do file monitoring. It currently comes with an Inotify
subclass that uses the Linux inotify interface, as well as a fallback that
is just written in Perl.
I'm hoping that in the future we'll see other OS-specific implementations.
I'd appreciate if people would test out the new code. You'll need to
regenerate your myapp_server.pl script to actually see the changes. Old
scripts will of course continue to work, since the old restarter code is
still in Catalyst-Runtime.
-dave
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