This is substantially slower than using make, does not build or install
documentation, does not run the test suite, and is not particularly
recommended, but could be useful to some.
All commands that often have to read a lot of information from
the git-annex branch should now be nearly as fast as before
the branch was introduced.
Before fsck was taking approximatly 3 hours, now it's running in 8 minutes.
The code is very nasty. It should be rewritten to read the header line
from git cat-file, and then read the specified number of bytes of content.
Since the logs have just been moved into the git-annex branch, don't need
to worry about backwards compatability with old versions of git-annex that
would fail to parse location logs with extra fields tacked on.
git is slow when the index file is large and has to be rewritten each time
a file is changed. To speed this up, added a journal where changes are
recorded before being fed into the index file and committed to the
git-annex branch. The entire journal can be fed into git with just 2
commands, and only one write of the index file.
This is a new git subcommand, that does a generic union merge operation
between two refs, storing the result in a branch. It operates efficiently
without touching the working tree. It does need to write out a temporary
index file, and may need to write out some other temp files as well.
This could be useful for anything that stores data in a branch,
and needs to merge changes into that branch without actually checking the
branch out. Since conflict handling can't be done without a working copy,
the merge type is always a union merge, which is fine for data stored in
log format (as git-annex does), or in non-conflicting files
(as pristine-tar does).
This probably belongs in git proper, but it will live in git-annex for now.
---
Plan is to move .git-annex/ to a git-annex branch, and use git-union-merge
to handle merging changes when pulling from remotes.
Some preliminary benchmarking using real .git-annex/ data indicates
that it's quite fast, except for the "git add" call, which is as slow
as "git add" tends to be with a big index.
