Allow autoreloader to use watchman

[Aymeric Augustin]

I believe we should stop maintaining an autoreloader as soon as possible. Django’s autoreloader is annoyingly slow, highly inefficient, moderately well designed, and a gigantic pain to maintain. I’m more scared of django.utils.autoreload than of django.db.models.related before it was cleaned up.

I wish one day someone will take the time to write a good autoreloading dev server based on watchman. This would solve the problem discussed here because watchman watches all files in the current directory. The correct way to do this is to throw away the current design and start from scratch.

Watchman is smart enough to wait until you’ve finished a git operation to trigger a reload. Once such polished tech has become available, trying to compete with a thread that checks the mtime of all known files every second isn’t funny anymore. In fact it’s just sad.

from ​django-developers thread

The ​Future of the development server's auto-reloading thread has some ideas about this.

EDIT -- That description was initially enclosed in a <rant> tag on the mailing list. While I stand by the facts, the tone is more ironic that what I'd write in a bug report. Different context.