git-annex/doc/todo/smudge.mdwn

git-annex should use smudge/clean filters.

----

Update: Currently, this does not look likely to work. In particular,
the clean filter needs to consume all stdin from git, which consists of the
entire content of the file. It cannot optimise by directly accessing
the file in the repository, because git may be cleaning a different
version of the file during a merge. 

So every `git status` would need to read the entire content of all
available files, and checksum them, which is too expensive.

----

The clean filter is run when files are staged for commit. So a user could copy
any file into the annex, git add it, and git-annex's clean filter causes
the file's key to be staged, while its value is added to the annex.

The smudge filter is run when files are checked out. Since git annex
repos have partial content, this would not git annex get the file content.
Instead, if the content is not currently available, it would need to do
something like return empty file content. (Sadly, it cannot create a
symlink, as git still wants to write the file afterwards.)

So the nice current behavior of unavailable files being clearly missing due
to dangling symlinks, would be lost when using smudge/clean filters.
(Contact git developers to get an interface to do this?)

Instead, we get the nice behavior of not having to remeber to `git annex
add` files, and just being able to use `git add` or `git commit -a`,
and have it use git-annex when .gitattributes says to. Also, annexed
files can be directly modified without having to `git annex unlock`.

### design

In .gitattributes, the user would put something like "* filter=git-annex".
This way they could control which files are annexed vs added normally.

(git-annex could have further controls to allow eg, passing small files
through to regular processing. At least .gitattributes is a special case,
it should never be annexed...)

For files not configured this way, git-annex could continue to use
its symlink method -- this would preserve backwards compatability,
and even allow mixing the two methods in a repo as desired.

To find files in the repository that are annexed, git-annex would do
`ls-files` as now, but would check if found files have the appropriate
filter, rather than the current symlink checks. To determine the key
of a file, rather than reading its symlink, git-annex would need to
look up the git blob associated with the file -- this can be done
efficiently using the existing code in `Branch.catFile`.

The clean filter would inject the file's content into the annex, and hard
link from the annex to the file. Avoiding duplication of data.

The smudge filter can't do that, so to avoid duplication of data, it
might always create an empty file. To get the content, `git annex get`
could be used (which would hard link it). A `post-checkout` hook might
be used to set up hard links for all currently available content.

#### clean

The trick is doing it efficiently. Since git a2b665d, v1.7.4.1,
something like this works to provide a filename to the clean script:

	git config --global filter.huge.clean huge-clean %f

This could avoid it needing to read all the current file content from stdin
when doing eg, a git status or git commit. Instead it is passed the
filename that git is operating on, in the working directory.
(Update: No, doesn't work; git may be cleaning a different file content
than is currently on disk, and git requires all stdin be consumed too.)

So, WORM could just look at that file and easily tell if it is one
it already knows (same mtime and size). If so, it can short-circuit and
do nothing, file content is already cached.

SHA1 has a harder job. Would not want to re-sha1 the file every time,
probably. So it'd need a local cache of file stat info, mapped to known
objects.

But: Even with %f, git actually passes the full file content to the clean
filter, and if it fails to consume it all, it will crash (may only happen
if the file is larger than some chunk size; tried with 500 mb file and 
saw a SIGPIPE.) This means unnecessary works needs to be done, 
and it slows down *everything*, from `git status` to `git commit`.
**showstopper** I have sent a patch to the git mailing list to address
this. <http://marc.info/?l=git&m=131465033512157&w=2> (Update: apparently
can't be fixed.)

#### smudge

The smudge script can also be provided a filename with %f, but it
cannot directly write to the file or git gets unhappy.

### dealing with partial content availability

The smudge filter cannot be allowed to fail, that leaves the tree and
index in a weird state. So if a file's content is requested by calling
the smudge filter, the trick is to instead provide dummy content,
indicating it is not available (and perhaps saying to run "git-annex get").

Then, in the clean filter, it has to detect that it's cleaning a file
with that dummy content, and make sure to provide the same identifier as
it would if the file content was there. 

I've a demo implementation of this technique in the scripts below.

----

### test files

huge-smudge:

<pre>
#!/bin/sh
read f
file="$1"
echo "smudging $f" >&2
if [ -e ~/$f ]; then
	cat ~/$f # possibly expensive copy here
else
	echo "$f not available"
fi
</pre>

huge-clean:

<pre>
#!/bin/sh
file="$1"
cat >/tmp/file
# in real life, this should be done more efficiently, not trying to read
# the whole file content!
if grep -q 'not available' /tmp/file; then
	awk '{print $1}' /tmp/file # provide what we would if the content were avail!
	exit 0
fi
echo "cleaning $file" >&2
# XXX store file content here
echo $file
</pre>

.gitattributes:

<pre>
*.huge filter=huge
</pre>

in .git/config:

<pre>
[filter "huge"]
        clean = huge-clean %f
        smudge = huge-smudge %f
<pre>