enable polling for file watching in all cases

Author: williamstein

src/packages/backend/watcher.ts

@@ -32,14 +32,20 @@ export class Watcher extends EventEmitter {
   private interval: number;
   private watcher: FSWatcher;
 
-  constructor(path: string, interval: number=300, debounce: number=0) {
+  constructor(path: string, interval: number = 300, debounce: number = 0) {
     super();
     this.path = path;
     this.interval = interval;
 
     L.debug(`${path}: interval=${interval}, debounce=${debounce}`);
     this.watcher = watch(this.path, {
-      interval: this.interval, // only effective if we end up forced to use polling
+      interval: this.interval,
+      // polling is critical for network mounted filesystems,
+      // and given architecture of cocalc there is no easy way around this.
+      // E.g., on compute servers, everything breaks involving sync or cloudfs,
+      // and in shared project s3/gcsfuse/sshfs would all break. So we
+      // use polling.
+      usePolling: true,
       persistent: false,
       alwaysStat: true,
       atomic: true,