Cannot seem to watch files outside of VS Code workspace directory

[fquinner]

Describe the bug
Watch does not seem to work with files outside of vscode directory. In C / C++, it's common to build projects outside of the workspace to keep the workspace clean and avoid bleeding over the codebase. However when you generate a build there, the watcher does not seem to pick up changes.

Note the initial parsing actually works fine, but it does not refresh.

To Reproduce
Steps to reproduce the behaviour:

1. Run VS Code Dev Container
2. Fire up coverage with coverage-gutters.manualCoverageFilePaths: [ "/path/to/filesystem/lcov.info" ]
3. Click on watch
4. Modify the filesystem file

Expected behaviour
Updated file should be refreshed.

Desktop (please complete the following information):

• OS: [Ubuntu 20.04 Docker Container (from windows)]
• Extension Version [2.11.0]
• VSCode Version [1.80.1]

Additional context
There generally seems to be some funnies in this area. I'm not a JS guy, but I also noticed that if I run with

    "coverage-gutters.coverageFileNames": [
        "lcov.info"
    ],
    "coverage-gutters.coverageBaseDir": "",

Then watch doesn't work either. Again, initial search might work but watch doesn't, it finds {/workspaces/project-dir}//{lcov.info}

Now I don't know about the GlobPattern in use here from the vscode libs, but if that was a bash glob, that would expand out to literal curly braces unless there was more than one element listed.

[mattseddon]

In order to watch files outside of the workspace we need to use a RelativePattern, see https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/blob/main/src/vscode-dts/vscode.d.ts#L12375 for some more details. I think this change was introduced around Jan 2022.

@ryanluker we do this in vscode-dvc using the pattern shown in this file: https://github.com/iterative/vscode-dvc/blob/main/extension/src/fileSystem/relativePattern.ts

Hope that helps.

[ryanluker]

@fquinner Thanks for the ticket! We will have to triage this work against the other in the next milestone.

@mattseddon Thanks for responding and providing that input, I bet there wasn't a feature like this when the extension was first built heh 😅 .

[celestialorb]

I'm experiencing the same issue. My organization uses Bazel, which produces a coverage report within the Bazel cache and is thus kept out of the repository, but is accessible via a symlink from the root of the repository of bazel-out. Manually rerunning the Coverage Gutters: Display Coverage command works, but using the Coverage Gutters: Watch command does not.

From some limited testing it seems that it simply doesn't detect when the file is modified and thus doesn't reload the coverage data.