Improved support for using git-annex in a read-only repository, git-annex
branch information from remotes that cannot be merged into the git-annex
branch will now not crash it, but will be merged in memory.
To avoid this making git-annex behave one way in a read-only repository,
and another way when it can write, it's important that Annex.Branch.get
return the same thing (modulo log file compaction) in both cases.
This manages that mostly. There are some exceptions:
- When there is a transition in one of the remote git-annex branches
that has not yet been applied to the local or other git-annex branches.
Transitions are not handled.
- `git-annex log` runs git log on the git-annex branch, and so
it will not be able to show information coming from the other, not yet
merged branches.
- Annex.Branch.files only looks at files in the git-annex branch and not
unmerged branches. This affects git-annex info output.
- Annex.Branch.hs.overBranchFileContents ditto. Affects --all and
also importfeed (but importfeed cannot work in a read-only repo
anyway).
- CmdLine.Seek.seekFilteredKeys when precaching location logs.
Note use of Annex.Branch.fullname
- Database.ContentIdentifier.needsUpdateFromLog and updateFromLog
These warts make this not suitable to be merged yet.
This readonly code path is more expensive, since it has to query several
branches. The value does get cached, but still large queries will be
slower in a read-only repository when there are unmerged git-annex
branches.
When annex.merge-annex-branches=false, updateTo skips doing anything,
and so the read-only repository code does not get triggered. So a user who
is bothered by the extra work can set that.
Other writes to the repository can still result in permissions errors.
This includes the initial creation of the git-annex branch, and of course
any writes to the git-annex branch.
Sponsored-by: Dartmouth College's Datalad project
When git-annex transferrer started up, and the journal contained something,
it would commit it to the git-annex branch. This caused excess commits to
the branch, in cases where normally several changes would be journalled and
committed together. That generated some excess git objects and was also
just noisy on stdout.
Since transferrer uses enableInteractiveBranchAccess, it does not need to
commit journalled changes, since the optimisation that avoids checking
the journal when reading from the branch is disabled for processes that
call that.
This commit was sponsored by Svenne Krap on Patreon.
My worry was that a preferred content expression that matches on metadata
would have removed the location log from cache, causing an expensive
re-read when a Seek action later checked the location log.
Especially when the --all optimisation in the previous commit
pre-cached the location log.
This also means that the --all optimisation could cache the metadata log
too, if it wanted too, but not currently done.
The cache is a list, with the most recently accessed file first. That
optimises it for the common case of reading the same file twice, eg a
get, examine, followed by set reads it twice. And sync --content reads the
location log 3 times in a row commonly.
But, as a list, it should not be made to be too long. I thought about
expanding it to 5 items, but that seemed unlikely to be a win commonly
enough to outweigh the extra time spent checking the cache.
Clearly there could be some further benchmarking and tuning here.
The cache was removed way back in 2012,
commit 3417c55189
Then I forgot I had removed it! I remember clearly multiple times when I
thought, "this reads the same data twice, but the cache will avoid that
being very expensive".
The reason it was removed was it messed up the assistant noticing when
other processes made changes. That same kind of problem has recently
been addressed when adding the optimisation to avoid reading the journal
unnecessarily.
Indeed, enableInteractiveJournalAccess is run in just the
right places, so can just piggyback on it to know when it's not safe
to use the cache.
The journal read optimisation in aeca7c220 later got fixed in eedd73b84
to stage and commit any files that were left in the journal by a
previous git-annex run. That's necessary for the optimisation to work
correctly. But it also meant that alwayscommit=false started committing
the previous git-annex processes journalled changes, which defeated the
purpose of the config setting entirely.
So, disable the optimisation when alwayscommit=false, leaving the
files in the journal and not committing them. See my comments on the bug
report for why this seemed the best approach.
Also fixes a problem when annex.merge-annex-branches=false and there
are changes in the journal. That config indirectly prevents committing
the journal. (Which seems a bit odd given its name, but it always has..)
So, when there were changes in the journal, perhaps left there due to
alwayscommit=false being set before, the optimisation would prevent
git-annex from reading the journal files, and it would operate with out
of date information.
The only price paid is one additional MVar read per write to the journal.
Presumably writing a journal file dominiates over a MVar read time by
several orders of magnitude.
--batch does not get the speedup because then it needs to notice when
another process has made a change. Also made the assistant and other damon
modes bypass the optimisation, which would not help them anyway.
This does not change the overall license of the git-annex program, which
was already AGPL due to a number of sources files being AGPL already.
Legally speaking, I'm adding a new license under which these files are
now available; I already released their current contents under the GPL
license. Now they're dual licensed GPL and AGPL. However, I intend
for all my future changes to these files to only be released under the
AGPL license, and I won't be tracking the dual licensing status, so I'm
simply changing the license statement to say it's AGPL.
(In some cases, others wrote parts of the code of a file and released it
under the GPL; but in all cases I have contributed a significant portion
of the code in each file and it's that code that is getting the AGPL
license; the GPL license of other contributors allows combining with
AGPL code.)
This cache prevented noticing changes made by another process.
The case I just ran into involved the assistant dropping a file, which
cached its presence info. Then the same file was downloaded again,
but the assistant didn't know its presence info had changed.
I don't see a way to keep this cache. Will instead rely on the OS level
file cache, for files in the journal. May need to add more higher-level
caching of info that it's ok to have a potentially stale copy of,
although much of git-annex already does so.
