This all works fine. But it doesn't check repository sizes yet, and
without repository size checking, once a repository gets full, there
will be no other repository that will want its files.
Use of sha2 seems unncessary, probably alder2 or md5 or crc would have
been enough. Possibly just summing up the bytes of the key mod the number
of repositories would have sufficed. But sha2 is there, and probably
hardware accellerated. I doubt very much there is any security benefit
to using it though. If someone wants to construct a key that will be
balanced onto a given repository, sha2 is certianly not going to stop
them.
Avoid `git-annex sync --content` etc from operating on cluster nodes by default
since syncing with a cluster implicitly syncs with its nodes. This avoids a
lot of unncessary work when a cluster has a lot of nodes just in checking
if each node's preferred content is satisfied. And it avoids content
being sent to nodes individually, so instead syncing with clusters always
fanout uploads to nodes.
The downside is that there are situations where a cluster's preferred content
settings can be met, but those of its nodes are not. Or where a node does not
contain a key, but the cluster does, and there are not enough copies of the key
yet, so it would be desirable the send it there. I think that's an acceptable
tradeoff. These kind of situations are ones where the cluster itself should
probably be responsible for copying content to the node. Which it can do much
less expensively than a client can. Part of the balanced preferred content
design that I will be working on in a couple of months involves rebalancing
clusters, so I expect to revisit this.
The use of annex-sync config does allow running git-annex sync with a specific
node, or nodes, and it will sync with it. And it's also possible to set
annex-sync git configs to make it sync with a node by default. (Although that
will require setting up an explicit git remote for the node rather than relying
on the proxied remote.)
Logs.Cluster.Basic is needed because Remote.Git cannot import Logs.Cluster
due to a cycle. And the Annex.Startup load of clusters happens
too late for Remote.Git to use that. This does mean one redundant load
of the cluster log, though only when there is a proxy.
