This is conceptually very simple, just making a 1 that was hard coded be
exposed as a config option. The hard part was plumbing all that, and
dealing with complexities like reading it from git attributes at the
same time that numcopies is read.
Behavior change: When numcopies is set to 0, git-annex used to drop
content without requiring any copies. Now to get that (highly unsafe)
behavior, mincopies also needs to be set to 0. It seemed better to
remove that edge case, than complicate mincopies by ignoring it when
numcopies is 0.
This commit was sponsored by Denis Dzyubenko on Patreon.
* numcopies: New command, sets global numcopies value that is seen by all
clones of a repository.
* The annex.numcopies git config setting is deprecated. Once the numcopies
command is used to set the global number of copies, any annex.numcopies
git configs will be ignored.
* assistant: Make the prefs page set the global numcopies.
This global numcopies setting is needed to let preferred content
expressions operate on numcopies.
It's also convenient, because typically if you want git-annex to preserve N
copies of files in a repo, you want it to do that no matter which repo it's
running in. Making it global avoids needing to warn the user about gotchas
involving inconsistent annex.numcopies settings.
(See changes to doc/numcopies.mdwn.)
Added a new variety of git-annex branch log file, that holds only 1 value.
Will probably be useful for other stuff later.
This commit was sponsored by Nicolas Pouillard.
Backends are now only used to generate keys (and check them); they
are not arbitrary key-value stores for data, because it turned out such
a store is better modeled as a special remote. Updated docs to not
imply backends do more than they do now.
Sometimes I'm tempted to rename "backend" to "keytype" or something,
which would really be more clear. But it would be an annoying transition
for users, with annex.backends etc.
