Pavlovia experiment changes are delayed in "run" version

It has happened to me a number of times that the ‘run’ version has not updated, despite the update having been recorded on the gitlab page when I click the ‘View code’ button. I don’t know what causes it to happen. It has resulted in many wasted debugging hours, not realising that Pavlovia is silently ignoring all the changes I make.

What I now do when this happens is I copy the .psyexp file to a new folder and create a new Pavlovia project from it. The file has to go into a new folder to trick Pavlovia into creating a new project when I press synch. Although Pavlovia doesn’t require the name of the .psyexp file to be changed, PsychoPy does, so I also rename it. If I don’t, then Experiment Runner doesn’t list it as a new program (so the old one gets run), PsychoPy fails to create a new ‘_lastrun.py’ file and any updates are not implemented in PsychoPy (even though they are in Pavlovia).

As far as I can tell, Pavlovia and PsychoPy each suffer separately from bouts of update insensitivity, of unknown duration (I have never attempted to wait for them to resolve themselves). PsychoPy’s bouts might be caused by uncaught coding errors, or by moving the project folder (https://discourse.psychopy.org/t/uncaught-error-in-keyboard-allowed-keys/12819/2), or on other occasions by no cause that I can discern. The problem is always fixed by renaming the .psyexp file, with no need to copy to a new folder. I have no idea what triggers Pavlovia’s episodes, but I recently returned to two projects that I had not worked on for several weeks and both of them were moribund. This problem is always fixed by moving the .psyexp file to a new folder.