When doing some Java development on VSCode, I wanted to use inotifywait to watch for source file changes and automatically build the project when a source file is changed.
It seemed like a neat and simple idea. However, as soon as I set up inotifywait to watch the source directory, I ran into problems and had to abandon the idea (for the time being).
So the project is built using Maven. The problems are:
VSCode cannot resolve source package files: the IDE shows errors on imports from source packages inside the source tree. Imports from the Java library work fine though.
Maven doesn't build source package files: the produced jar file doesn't contain the class files anymore.
It's like the files just went missing -- what did inotifywait do to cause this problem? Reading the manpage, it seems that inotifywait does little more than put inotify(7) watches recursively on the src directory.