Get metadata for resource (e.g. modification time).

[Thom1729]

Currently, in order to determine whether a resource exists, you have to either:

• Enumerate all resources with that filename using sublime.find_resources and check whether the desired resource is in the list. This may be inefficient if there are many resources with that name (e.g. __init__.py). This is the approach that sublime_lib.ResourcePath.exists() uses.
• Load the resource using sublime.load_binary_resource() and catch IOError. This may be inefficient if the resource is large.

In order to determine whether a resource has been modified, you have to read the entire resource and compare it to a previous version. It can't be done manually using the filesystem because you can't tell whether an override has disappeared.

Suggested API

sublime.stat_resource(name)

Returns an object with the following property:

• modified: An int (or float) that is guaranteed to increase when Sublime notices that the resource has been modified, including when its override status has changed. (This could be a timestamp, of course, as long as it's monotonic while Sublime is open.)

Raises IOError if there is not a resource at name.

Applications

• A plugin that does expensive processing of resources (such as parsing syntax definitions with ruamel.yaml) could keep an internal cache with the name, modified value, and the processed output, only recomputing the output when modified increases.
• A test script that modifies a resource could check modified before modifying and wait to continue the test until modified changes.

Other properties

Some other properties could be useful on the “stat” object. These could be implemented right away, eventually, or never, but the possibility of implementing them motivates having a stat_resource() method returning an object rather than a single-purpose resource_modified() method.

• file_path: The path to the current logical filesystem location of the resource, such as /Users/thom/Library/Application Support/Sublime Text 3/Installed Packages/Foo.sublime-package/bar.py.
• real_path: The path to the current physical filesystem location, such as /Users/thom/Library/Application Support/Sublime Text 3/Installed Packages/Foo.sublime-package or (for a symlinked package) /Users/thom/Repositories/Packages/JavaScript/JavaScript.sublime-syntax.
• file_paths: A list of paths of each “version” of the resource, including overridden versions.
• size: The logical size of the resource in bytes.

[FichteFoll]

For the time being, I believe going through zipfile is the proper workaround.

[Thom1729]

It's a partial workaround, but it can't determine resource modification time. You could work around this by computing a tuple (physical file path, physical file modification time), but that could fail too in some cases (installed package file exists, override created, override destroyed). The tuple would tell you whether the resource is the same as the last time you checked, but not whether it has been changed since then. In many cases, this may be sufficient. (Possibly something to consider for sublime_lib.)