I noticed that, using just the man pages, there is no real description
of what backends are, or what ones are available. Except for some
examples.
Added a git-annex-backends man page, that is just a stub, but at least
describes what they basically are, and tells how to find the supported
ons, and links to the backends web page.
Sponsored-by: Brett Eisenberg on Patreon
This solves the problem that import of such files gets confused and
converts them back to annexed files.
The import code already used GIT keys internally when it determined a
file should not be annexed. So now when it sees a GIT key that export
used, it already does the right thing.
This also means that even older version of git-annex can import and will
do the right thing, once a fixed version has exported. Still, there may
be other complications around upgrades; still need to think it all
through.
Moved gitShaKey and keyGitSha from Key to Annex.Export since they're
only used for export/import.
Documented GIT keys in backends, since they do appear in the git-annex
branch now.
This commit was sponsored by Graham Spencer on Patreon.
using a blake2 variant optimised for 4-way CPUs
This had been deferred because the Debian package of cryptonite, and
possibly other builds, was broken for blake2bp, but I've confirmed #892855
is fixed.
This commit was sponsored by Brett Eisenberg on Patreon.
There are a lot of different variants and sizes, I suppose we might as well
export all the common ones.
Bump dep to cryptonite to 0.16, earlier versions lacked BLAKE2 support.
Even android has 0.16 or newer.
On Debian, Blake2bp_512 is buggy, so I have omitted it for now.
http://bugs.debian.org/892855
This commit was sponsored by andrea rota.
It takes a single key-value backend, rather than the unncessary and confusing list.
The old option still works if set.
Simplified some old old code too.
This commit was sponsored by Thomas Hochstein on Patreon.
Even if annex.backends does not include a backend, that does not prevent
git-annex commands from acting on a file using the missing backend.
(There's really no reason at all for annex.backends to be a list.)
While cryptohash has SHA3 support, it has not been updated for the final
version of the spec. Note that cryptonite has not been ported to all arches
that cryptohash builds on yet.
SHA3 is still waiting for final standardization.
Although this is looking less likely given
https://www.cdt.org/blogs/joseph-lorenzo-hall/2409-nist-sha-3
In the meantime, cryptohash implements skein, and it's used by some of the
haskell ecosystem (for yesod sessions, IIRC), so this implementation is
likely to continue working. Also, I've talked with the cryprohash author
and he's a reasonable guy.
It makes sense to have an alternate high security hash, in case some
horrible attack is found against SHA2 tomorrow, or in case SHA3 comes out
and worst fears are realized.
I'd also like to support using skein for HMAC. But no hurry there and
a new version of cryptohash has much nicer HMAC code, so I will probably
wait until I can use that version.
The default backend used when adding files to the annex is changed from
SHA256 to SHA256E, to simplify interoperability with OSX, media players,
and various programs that needlessly look at symlink targets.
To get old behavior, add a .gitattributes containing: * annex.backend=SHA256
To get old behavior, add a .gitattributes containing: * annex.backend=WORM
I feel that SHA256 is a better default for most people, as long as their
systems are fast enough that checksumming their files isn't a problem.
git-annex should default to preserving the integrity of data as well as git
does. Checksum backends also work better with editing files via
unlock/lock.
I considered just using SHA1, but since that hash is believed to be somewhat
near to being broken, and git-annex deals with large files which would be a
perfect exploit medium, I decided to go to a SHA-2 hash.
SHA512 is annoyingly long when displayed, and git-annex displays it in a
few places (and notably it is shown in ls -l), so I picked the shorter
hash. Considered SHA224 as it's even shorter, but feel it's a bit weird.
I expect git-annex will use SHA-3 at some point in the future, but
probably not soon!
Note that systems without a sha256sum (or sha256) program will fall back to
defaulting to SHA1.
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.
