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During the API review of MaterFS (issue 40958), an idea was raised that MasterFS could help other modules (e.g. MDR) with listening on external file changes - thus eliminating the need for modules to collect all the files in the whole file tree of their interest. MasterFS would provide effective refreshing of the file tree without having to create all the FileObjects for all the files. There were some possible approaches discussed with conclusion that real requirements and use cases are needed to be known first. But this suggestion was considered worth recording.
Not sure what this has to do with masterfs in particular; seems like a general RFE for the Filesystems API. Potentially complex to implement. Note that Eclipse deals with this issue by keeping some kind of metadata about the "last seen and parsed" state of all files in a project, which is remembered when the IDE shuts down; when you start up again, the module (e.g. that which keeps a metadata cache) is informed of all changes on disk since it last shut down.
I also think that this issue is more general. There must first precede some API changes into filesystem library with clear documentation about semantic of this functionality in general and then just provide some special (maybe somehow sophisticated) impl. in MasterFileSystem. As a result of above comment: - changed issue type to RFE - removed dependency of #40958 on this issue
*** This issue has been marked as a duplicate of 33162 ***