Specify a default polling frquency

[madduck]

The concept of "polling frequency" is only relevant to when watchdog falls back to a PollingObserver, which is hopefully seldom the case. However, if no other observer can be used, then the package does default to using a PollingObserver.

If I create an instance like PollingObserverVFS directly, I can specify the polling_frequency. But if I instantiate an Observer, and _get_observer_cls() falls back to PollingObserver, there is no way for me to change the polling frequency, or is there?

The default of 1s is IMHO too frequent. It would be good to be able to change this default.

[BoboTiG]

Can you set this constant to the value you desire?

watchdog/src/watchdog/observers/api.py

Line 17 in d197487

DEFAULT_OBSERVER_TIMEOUT = 1.0 # in seconds

[madduck]

Can you set this constant to the value you desire?

I cannot change this constant when importing, and I'd rather not have to resort to monkeypatching.

The current design doesn't really allow for passing this value to the constructor, because of the way that Observer is actually not a factory, but a variable referencing other factories that do not have a common constructor signature.

I think the best solution would be to deprecate Observer as it's currently used, and instead to provide a factory like make_observer that takes e.g. an optional timeout value and returns an actual instance of an Observer, and if it's a PollingObserver, then it would have passed timeout to the constructor.