Can be used to override the default timestamps used in log files in the
git-annex branch. This is a dangerous environment variable; use with
caution.
Note that this only affects writing to the logs on the git-annex branch.
It is not used for metadata in git commits (other env vars can be set for
that).
There are many other places where timestamps are still used, that don't
get committed to git, but do touch disk. Including regular timestamps
of files, and timestamps embedded in some files in .git/annex/, including
the last fsck timestamp and timestamps in transfer log files.
A good way to find such things in git-annex is to get for getPOSIXTime and
getCurrentTime, although some of the results are of course false positives
that never hit disk (unless git-annex gets swapped out..)
So this commit does NOT necessarily make git-annex comply with some HIPPA
privacy regulations; it's up to the user to determine if they can use it in
a way compliant with such regulations.
Benchmarking: It takes 0.00114 milliseconds to call getEnv
"GIT_ANNEX_VECTOR_CLOCK" when that env var is not set. So, 100 thousand log
files can be written with an added overhead of only 0.114 seconds. That
should be by far swamped by the actual overhead of writing the log files
and making the commit containing them.
This commit was supported by the NSF-funded DataLad project.
... to control the default behavior in all clones of a repository.
This includes a new Configurable data type, so the GitConfig type indicates
which values can be configured this way.
The implementation should be quite efficient; the config log is only read
once, and only when a Configurable value has not already been set by
git-config.
Indeed, it would be nice in the future to extend this, so that git-config
is itself only read on demand. Some commands may not need to look at the
git configuration at all.
This commit was sponsored by Trenton Cronholm on Patreon.
