I'm down to 9 places in the code that can produce unwaited for zombies.
Most of these are pretty innocuous, at least for now, are only
used in short-running commands, or commands that run a set of
actions and explicitly reap zombies after each one.
The one from Annex.Branch.files could be trouble later,
since both Command.Fsck and Command.Unused can trigger it,
and the assistant will be doing those eventally. Ditto the one in
Git.LsTree.lsTree, which Command.Unused uses.
The only ones currently affecting the assistant though, are
in Git.LsFiles. Several threads use several of those.
(And yeah, using pipes or ResourceT would be a less ad-hoc approach,
but I don't really feel like ripping my entire code base apart right
now to change a foundation monad. Maybe one of these days..)
Under ghc 7.4, this seems to be able to handle all filename encodings
again. Including filename encodings that do not match the LANG setting.
I think this will not work with earlier versions of ghc, it uses some ghc
internals.
Turns out that ghc 7.4 has a special filesystem encoding that it uses when
reading/writing filenames (as FilePaths). This encoding is documented
to allow "arbitrary undecodable bytes to be round-tripped through it".
So, to get FilePaths from eg, git ls-files, set the Handle that is reading
from git to use this encoding. Then things basically just work.
However, I have not found a way to make Text read using this encoding.
Text really does assume unicode. So I had to switch back to using String
when reading/writing data to git. Which is a pity, because it's some
percent slower, but at least it works.
Note that stdout and stderr also have to be set to this encoding, or
printing out filenames that contain undecodable bytes causes a crash.
IMHO this is a misfeature in ghc, that the user can pass you a filename,
which you can readFile, etc, but that default, putStr of filename may
cause a crash!
Git.CheckAttr gave me special trouble, because the filenames I got back
from git, after feeding them in, had further encoding breakage.
Rather than try to deal with that, I just zip up the input filenames
with the attributes. Which must be returned in the same order queried
for this to work.
Also of note is an apparent GHC bug I worked around in Git.CheckAttr. It
used to forkProcess and feed git from the child process. Unfortunatly,
after this forkProcess, accessing the `files` variable from the parent
returns []. Not the value that was passed into the function. This screams
of a bad bug, that's clobbering a variable, but for now I just avoid
forkProcess there to work around it. That forkProcess was itself only added
because of a ghc bug, #624389. I've confirmed that the test case for that
bug doesn't reproduce it with ghc 7.4. So that's ok, except for the new ghc
bug I have not isolated and reported. Why does this simple bit of code
magnet the ghc bugs? :)
Also, the symlink touching code is currently broken, when used on utf-8
filenames in a non-utf-8 locale, or probably on any filename containing
undecodable bytes, and I temporarily commented it out.
In git, a Ref can be a Sha, or a Branch, or a Tag. I added type aliases for
those. Note that this does not prevent mixing up of eg, refs and branches
at the type level. Since git really doesn't care, except rare cases like
git update-ref, or git tag -d, that seems ok for now.
There's also a tree-ish, but let's just use Ref for it. A given Sha or Ref
may or may not be a tree-ish, depending on the object type, so there seems
no point in trying to represent it at the type level.
Many functions took the repo as their first parameter. Changing it
consistently to be the last parameter allows doing some useful things with
currying, that reduce boilerplate.
In particular, g <- gitRepo is almost never needed now, instead
use inRepo to run an IO action in the repo, and fromRepo to get
a value from the repo.
This also provides more opportunities to use monadic and applicative
combinators.
This yields a second or so speedup in unused, find, etc. Seems that even
when the ByteString is immediately split and then converted to Strings,
it's faster.
I may try to push ByteStrings out into more of git-annex gradually,
although I suspect most of the time-critical parts are already covered
now, and many of the rest rely on libraries that only support Strings.
Added Git.ByteString which replaces Git IO methods with ones using lazy
ByteStrings. This can be more efficient when large quantities of data are
being read from git.
In Git.LsTree, parse git ls-tree output more efficiently, thanks
to ByteString. This benchmarks 25% faster, in a benchmark that includes
(probably predominately) the run time for git ls-tree itself.
In real world numbers, this makes git annex unused 2 seconds faster for
each branch it needs to check, in my usual large repo.
