So far this only handles auto-annexing new files that are created inside
the repository while it's running. To make this really useful,
it needs to at least:
- notice deleted files and stage the deletion
(tricky; there's a race with add..)
- notice renamed files, auto-fix the symlink, and stage the new file location
- periodically auto-commit staged changes
- honor .gitignore, not adding files it excludes
Also nice to have would be:
- Somehow sync remotes, possibly using a push sync like dvcs-autosync
does, so they are immediately updated.
- Somehow get content that is unavilable. This is problimatic with inotify,
since we only get an event once the user has tried (and failed) to read
from the file. Perhaps instead, automatically copy content that is added
out to remotes, with the goal of all repos eventually getting a copy,
if df allows.
- Drop files that have not been used lately, or meet some other criteria
(as long as there's a copy elsewhere).
- Perhaps automatically dropunused files that have been deleted,
although I cannot see a way to do that, since by the time the inotify
deletion event arrives, the file is deleted, and we cannot see what
its symlink pointed to! Alternatievely, perhaps automatically
do an expensive unused/dropunused cleanup process.
Some of this probably needs the currently stateless threads to maintain
a common state.
git-annex (but not git-annex-shell) supports the git help.autocorrect
configuration setting, doing fuzzy matching using the restricted
Damerau-Levenshtein edit distance, just as git does. This adds a build
dependency on the haskell edit-distance library.
Recursive inotify has beaten me before, with its bad design and races,
but not this time! (I think.) This is able to follow the strongest
filesystem traffic I can throw at it, and robustly notices every file
add and delete. Mostly that's down to Haskell having a quite nice threaded
inotify library (that does its own buffering). A key insight was realizing
that the inotify directory add race could be dealt with by scanning for
files inside newly added directories.
TODO: Add support for freebsd/osx kqueue; see
http://hackage.haskell.org/package/kqueue
Can a git-annex-monitor be far off?
Continue using the key name as bup ref name, to preserve backwards
compatability, unless it is an illegal git ref. In that case, use a sha256
of the key name instead.