Gulp - suspend watcher during task execution

gulpfile-suspend-watcher.js

var gulp = require('gulp');

function doGitCheckout(callback) {
  console.log('doing checkout...');
  setTimeout(function() {
    console.log('done checkout...');
    callback();
  }, 1000);
}

var watcher;

gulp.task('watch:start', function() {
  if (!watcher) {
    watcher = gulp.watch('dist/**/*', ['build']);
    console.log('started watcher');
  }
});

gulp.task('watch:stop', function() {
  if (watcher) {
    watcher.end();
    watcher = null;
    console.log('stopped watcher');
  }
});


gulp.task('git:checkout', ['watch:stop'], function(cb) {
  console.log('isWatching = ' + !!watcher);

  // Start the Git checkout...
  doGitCheckout(function() {
    // The Git checkout is finished!
    gulp.start('watch:start', function() {
      cb();
    });
  });
});

gulp.task('default', ['watch:start', 'git:checkout']);

This looked promising for my use case, but my use case uses gulp.watch() which is a long running process and I tried tweaking this example to stop my process and it only seemed to work once no matter what I did. Oh well I found another solution to get my process to not fight with gulp running and killing processes when it detected file changes.

@davidrenne What was the other solution? This solution doesn't work for me either.