* Deal with clock skew, both forwards and backwards, when logging
information to the git-annex branch.
* GIT_ANNEX_VECTOR_CLOCK can now be set to a fixed value (eg 1)
rather than needing to be advanced each time a new change is made.
* Misuse of GIT_ANNEX_VECTOR_CLOCK will no longer confuse git-annex.
When changing a file in the git-annex branch, the vector clock to use is now
determined by first looking at the current time (or GIT_ANNEX_VECTOR_CLOCK
when set), and comparing it to the newest vector clock already in use in
that file. If a newer time stamp was already in use, advance it forward by
a second instead.
When the clock is set to a time in the past, this avoids logging with
an old timestamp, which would risk that log line later being ignored in favor
of "newer" line that is really not newer.
When a log entry has been made with a clock that was set far ahead in the
future, this avoids newer information being logged with an older timestamp
and so being ignored in favor of that future-timestamped information.
Once all clocks get fixed, this will result in the vector clocks being
incremented, until finally enough time has passed that time gets back ahead
of the vector clock value, and then it will return to usual operation.
(This latter situation is not ideal, but it seems the best that can be done.
The issue with it is, since all writers will be incrementing the last
vector clock they saw, there's no way to tell when one writer made a write
significantly later in time than another, so the earlier write might
arbitrarily be picked when merging. This problem is why git-annex uses
timestamps in the first place, rather than pure vector clocks.)
Advancing forward by 1 second is somewhat arbitrary. setDead
advances a timestamp by just 1 picosecond, and the vector clock could
too. But then it would interfere with setDead, which wants to be
overrulled by any change. So it could use 2 picoseconds or something,
but that seems weird. It could just as well advance it forward by a
minute or whatever, but then it would be harder for real time to catch
up with the vector clock when forward clock slew had happened.
A complication is that many log files contain several different peices of
information, and it may be best to only use vector clocks for the same peice
of information. For example, a key's location log file contains
InfoPresent/InfoMissing for each UUID, and it only looks at the vector
clocks for the UUID that is being changed, and not other UUIDs.
Although exactly where the dividing line is can be hard to determine.
Consider metadata logs, where a field "tag" can have multiple values set
at different times. Should it advance forward past the last tag?
Probably. What about when a different field is set, should it look at
the clocks of other fields? Perhaps not, but currently it does, and
this does not seems like it will cause any problems.
Another one I'm not entirely sure about is the export log, which is
keyed by (fromuuid, touuid). So if multiple repos are exporting to the
same remote, different vector clocks can be used for that remote.
It looks like that's probably ok, because it does not try to determine
what order things occurred when there was an export conflict.
Sponsored-by: Jochen Bartl on Patreon
Especially from borg, where the content identifier logs
all end up being the same identical file!
But also, for other imports, the location tracking logs can,
in some cases, be identical files.
Bonus optimisation: Avoid looking up (and parsing when set)
GIT_ANNEX_VECTOR_CLOCK env var every time a log is written to.
Although the lookup does happen at startup even when no
log will be written now.
This does not change the overall license of the git-annex program, which
was already AGPL due to a number of sources files being AGPL already.
Legally speaking, I'm adding a new license under which these files are
now available; I already released their current contents under the GPL
license. Now they're dual licensed GPL and AGPL. However, I intend
for all my future changes to these files to only be released under the
AGPL license, and I won't be tracking the dual licensing status, so I'm
simply changing the license statement to say it's AGPL.
(In some cases, others wrote parts of the code of a file and released it
under the GPL; but in all cases I have contributed a significant portion
of the code in each file and it's that code that is getting the AGPL
license; the GPL license of other contributors allows combining with
AGPL code.)
Probably not any particular speedup in this, since most of these logs
are not written to often. Possibly chunk log writing is sped up, but
writes to chunk logs are interleaved with expensive data transfers to
remotes, so unlikely to be a noticiable speedup.
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.
