Best practice for running a watcher sensitive to devenv.nix changes?

[mx00s]

I ran into a minor pain point recently that could potentially inform the design of #1362. It could easily be out of scope too; I'm not sure.

I have a scripts.watch-tests.exec that uses cargo-watch to rerun tests implemented in scripts.run-tests.exec whenever files change. For the most part this works really well. I have direnv set up I just cd into my project directory and run watch-tests to get continuous feedback as I develop.

Now, the minor pain point: whenever I change devenv.nix I have to remember to ctrl+c out of that watch-tests script, patiently wait for direnv to reload, and then rerun watch-tests. Sometimes I hit ctrl+c twice, either accidentally or because I needed to do something else, and this aborts the direnv reload before it can finish. In that case, I need to remember to manually reload before I launch watch-tests again. Although the watcher I run picks up on the devenv.nix change and reruns run-tests, it doesn't actually incorporate the effects of changes to devenv.nix.

I'd prefer to have watch-tests seamlessly reload direnv whenever devenv.nix changes so I can get immediate feedback. Adding direnv reload to the start of scripts.run-tests.exec doesn't fix it.

I haven't investigated much yet, but I suspect another devenv abstraction may be more fitting than scripts. Perhaps I should revisit processes or services now that other aspects of this project's workflow have matured more.