Using a single strictness annotation, in just the right place.
Tried several others, none of which helped and some of which potentially
hurt. This is only the second time I've really had to deal with this in
a year of using haskell, which is, I suppose not that bad.
All commands that often have to read a lot of information from
the git-annex branch should now be nearly as fast as before
the branch was introduced.
Before fsck was taking approximatly 3 hours, now it's running in 8 minutes.
The code is very nasty. It should be rewritten to read the header line
from git cat-file, and then read the specified number of bytes of content.
Since the logs have just been moved into the git-annex branch, don't need
to worry about backwards compatability with old versions of git-annex that
would fail to parse location logs with extra fields tacked on.
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.