This is a new git subcommand, that does a generic union merge operation
between two refs, storing the result in a branch. It operates efficiently
without touching the working tree. It does need to write out a temporary
index file, and may need to write out some other temp files as well.
This could be useful for anything that stores data in a branch,
and needs to merge changes into that branch without actually checking the
branch out. Since conflict handling can't be done without a working copy,
the merge type is always a union merge, which is fine for data stored in
log format (as git-annex does), or in non-conflicting files
(as pristine-tar does).
This probably belongs in git proper, but it will live in git-annex for now.
---
Plan is to move .git-annex/ to a git-annex branch, and use git-union-merge
to handle merging changes when pulling from remotes.
Some preliminary benchmarking using real .git-annex/ data indicates
that it's quite fast, except for the "git add" call, which is as slow
as "git add" tends to be with a big index.
cp is still used when copying file from repos on the same filesystem, since
--reflink=auto can make it significantly faster on filesystems such as
btrfs.
Directory special remotes still use cp, not rsync. It's not clear what
tmp file should be used when rsyncing to such a remote.
get not honoring --from has surprised me a few times, so least surprise
suggests it should just behave like copy --from. This leaves the difference
between get and copy being that copy always requires the remote to copy
from, while get will decide whether to get a file from a key/value store or
a remote.
