Auto-regeneration does not work on Ubuntu 18.04 WSL 2 - version

[lena-hinrichsen]

Problem

Running make serve under Ubuntu 18.04 with WSL 2 (did not test for WSL 1) will break auto-regeneration:

Auto-regeneration may not work on some Windows versions.
Please see: https://github.com/Microsoft/BashOnWindows/issues/216
If it does not work, please upgrade Bash on Windows or run Jekyll with --no-watch.

Proposed solution

This works for me: jekyll/jekyll#5462 (comment) (change one line in vendor\bundle\ruby\2.5.0\gems\jekyll-4.2.2\lib\jekyll\commands\build.rb)

But I don't know if that will break something for other (non-WSL) versions.

[kba]

Since make serve is mostly for our own usage, I see no reason not to include that hack. However, the workaround is 6 years old and does not seem to apply in my installation, i.e. the relevant part of my vendor/bundle/ruby/2.5.0/gems/jekyll-4.2.2/lib/jekyll/commands/build.rb looks like this:

if Utils::Platforms.bash_on_windows?                                                     
  Jekyll.logger.warn "",                                                                 
                     "Auto-regeneration may not work on some Windows versions."          
  Jekyll.logger.warn "",                                                                 
                     "Please see: https://github.com/Microsoft/BashOnWindows/issues/216" 
  Jekyll.logger.warn "",                                                                 
                     "If it does not work, please upgrade Bash on Windows or "\          
                     "run Jekyll with --no-watch."                                       
end                                                                                      
                                                                                         
External.require_with_graceful_fail "jekyll-watch"                                       
Jekyll::Watcher.watch(options, site)                                                     

AFAICS, the if-clause only outputs warnings but doesn't change anything.

Also, changing the source code of a gem will require rebuilding the Gemfile.lock and is generally non-trivial to automate.

Maybe instead, you could add documentation to the README?

[kba]

Indeed, the (no-op) warnings are gone in the newest release: https://github.com/jekyll/jekyll/pull/8821/files

[lena-hinrichsen]

AFAICS, the if-clause only outputs warnings but doesn't change anything.

I thought that too when I looked at the lines but somehow there actually was a difference. Maybe I just have to retest.

[lena-hinrichsen]

Of course, there was something odd when I originally tested.
What works for me instead, is adding --force_polling \ as a parameter for serve in the Makefile (line 122-128).

Are there any objections to do that? If not, I can make a PR.

[kba]

If --force-polling solves the problem for you, then sure, add it to the Makefile. You can also directly push it to master, no need for a PR. It's probably a bit less efficient in Linux which doesn't require polling but it's more important that it works for you.