I've not been blogging, but have been busy this week. Backlog is down to
113 messages.

Tuesday: I got a weird bug report where `git annex get` was deleting
a file. This turned out to be a bug in `wget ftp://...` where it would
delete a symlink that was not where it had been told to download the fie
to. I put a workaround in git-annex; wget is now run in a temp
directory. But this was a legitimate wget bug, and it's now been reported
to the wget developers and will hopefully get fixed there.

Wednesday: Added a --batch mode for several plumbing commands
(contentlocation, examinekey, and lookupkey). This avoids startup overhead,
and so lets a lot of queries be done much faster. The implementation
should make it easy to add --batch to more plumbing commands as needed,
and could probably extend to non-plumbing commands too.

Today: The first 5 hours involved an incompatible mess of ssh and rsync
versions on Windows. A Gordian knot of brokenness and dependency hell.
I finally found a solution which involves downgrading the cygwin rsync
to an older version, and using msysgit's ssh rather than cygwin's.

Finished up today with more post-Debian-release changes. Landed a patch to
switch from dataenc to sandi that had been waiting since 2013, and got
sandi installed on all the git-annex autobuilders. Finished up with some
prep for a release tomorrow.

----

Finally, Debian has a new enough ghc that it can build template haskell
on arm! So, whenever a new version of git-annex finally gets into Debian
(I hope soon), the webapp will be available on arm for those arm laptops.
Yay!

This also means I have the opportunity to make the standalone arm build
be done much more simply. Currently it involves qemu and a separate
companion native mode container that it has to ssh to and build stuff,
that has to have the same versions of all libraries. It's just enormously
complicated and touchy. With template haskell building support, all that
complexity can fall away. 

What I'd really like to do is get a fast-ish arm box with 2gb of ram
hosted somewhere, and use that to do the builds, in native mode.
Anyone want to help provide such a box for git-annex arm autobuilds?
