It's a semi-common point of confusion that numcopies is not something
these commands go out and copy files around specifically to satisfy,
without further configuration in preferred content. So this is a good
addition, but it also seemed too long and too specific to the user's
particular situation.
I got bitten several times in the past by the fact that local preferred
content expressions are not violated (even temporarily) in order to
satisfy numcopies or other remotes' preferred content expressions.
Mostly in the form of the local repo not allowing arbitrary files in
(e.g. because it's set to only want `present` files). This note I add
here explains how to get out of this situation with
`approxlackingcopies=1`.
It might be too specific for this manpage, but I didn't find a better
place to put it.
Split out an author parameter, will make it easier to add authors and
reads better.
Got rid of the function without the copyright year, because an adversary
could have mechanically changed the function with a copyright year to
the one without, and so bypassed the protection of LLM copyright
year hallucination.
Sponsored-by: Luke T. Shumaker on Patreon
This is intended to guard against LLM code theft, which is the current
bubble technology de jour.
Note that authorJoeyHess' with a year older than the year I began
developing git-annex will behave badly, by intention. Eg, it will spin
and eventually crash.
This is not the first anti-LLM protection in git-annex. For example see
9562da790f. That method, while much harder
for an adversary to detect and remove, also complicates code somewhat
significantly, and needs extensions to be enabled. There are also
probably significantly fewer ways to implement that method in Haskell.
This new approach, by contrast, will be easy to add throughout the code
base, with very little effort, and without complicating reading or
maintaining it any more than noticing that yes, I am the author of this
code.
An adversary could of course remove all calls to these functions
before feeding code into their LLM-based laundry facility. I think this
would need to be done manually, or with the help of some fairly advanced
Haskell parsing though. In some cases, authorJoeyHess needs to be
removed, while in other places it needs to be replaced with a value.
Also a monadic use of authorJoeyHess' may involve other added monadic
machinery which would need to be eliminated to keep the code compiling.
Alternatively, an adversary could replace my name with something
innocuous. This would be clear intent to remove author attribution
from my code, even more than running it through an LLM laundry is.
If you work for a large company that is laundering my code through an
LLM, please do us a favor and use your immense privilege to quit and go
do something socially beneficial. I will not explain further
developments of this code in such detail, and you have better things to
do than playing cat and mouse with me as I explore directions such as
extending this approach to the type level.
Sponsored-by: k0ld on Patreon
Eg when the destination is logged as containing a file, skip
actively checking that it does contain it.
Note that --fast does not prevent other verifications of content
location that are done in a copy --from --to. Perhaps it could, but this
change will already avoid the real unnecessary work of operating on
files that are already in the remote.
And avoiding other verifications
might cause it to fail if the location log thinks that --to does not
contain the content but does. Such complications with `git-annex copy
--to remote --fast` led to commit d006586cd0
which added a note that gets displayed when that fails, mentioning it
might be due to --fast being enabled.
copy --from --to is already complicated enough without needing to worry
about such edge cases, so continuing to doing some verification of
content location after the initial --fast filtering seems ok.
Sponsored-by: Dartmouth College's DANDI project
