Had planned to spend all day not working on git-annex and instead getting caught up on conference videos. However, got a little bit multitasky while watching those, and started investigating why, last time I worked on Windows port, git-annex was failing to link.

A good thing to do while watching conference videos since it involved lots of test builds with different flags. Eventially solved it. Building w/o WebDAV avoids crashing the compiler anyhow.

Thought I'd try the resulting binary and see if perhaps I had forgotten to use the threaded RTS when I was running ghc by hand to link it last time, and perhaps that was why threads seemed to have hung back then.

It was. This became clear when I saw a "deadlocked indefinitely in MVar" error message, which tells me that it's at least using the threaded RTS. So, I fixed that, and a few other minor things, and ran this command in a DOS prompt box:

git annex watch --force --foreground --debug

And I've been making changes to files in that repository, and amazingly, the watcher is noticing them, and committing them!

So, I was almost entirely there to a windows port of the watcher a month ago, and didn't know. It has some rough edges, including not doing anything to check if a newly created file is open for write when adding it, and getting the full assistant ported will be more work, and the full webapp may be a whole other set of problems, but this is a quite nice milestone for the Windows port.