Until recently Cinera was a one-shot affair. A single run of the program would merely involve processing all the annotation files given to it, before exiting (typically in under a second). This speed-up alone is a pretty sweet step up from the existing annotation system for Handmade Hero which, on my machine and for reasons I'm really not sure I have the stomach to fathom, tended to take upward of a minute to do its stuff. In this state, however, Cinera would depend on some other service to monitor a repository or directory and trigger it into action when new annotations arrive for processing. Now, monitoring of Git{Hub,Lab,ea} repositories is still TODO, but as a step towards this I recently implemented monitoring of one local directory.

This was pretty straightforward to implement using the inotify API, and the new functionality nicely slotted in to the existing code which I had written with one eye on the program one day becoming an always-on thing. Now that we were always-on, th