Limited to min of -JN or number of CPU cores, because it will often be
CPU bound, once it's read the gitignore file for a directory.
In some situations it's more disk bound, but in any case it's unlikely
to be the main bottleneck that -J is used to avoid. Eg, when dropping,
this is used for numcopies checks, but the main bottleneck will be
accessing the remotes to verify presence. So the user might decide to
-J32 that, but having 32 check-attr processes would just waste however
many filehandles they open, and probably worsen their performance due to
CPU contention.
Note that, I first tried just letting up to the -JN be started. However,
even when it's no bottleneck at all, that still results in all of them
being started. Why? Well, all the worker threads start up nearly
simulantaneously, so there's a thundering herd..
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.)
Now gitattributes are looked up, efficiently, in only the places that
really need them, using the same approach used for cat-file.
The old CheckAttr code seemed very fragile, in the way it streamed files
through git check-attr.
I actually found that cad8824852
was still deadlocking with ghc 7.4, at the end of adding a lot of files.
This should fix that problem, and avoid future ones.
The best part is that this removes withAttrFilesInGit and withNumCopies,
which were complicated Seek methods, as well as simplfying the types
for several other Seek methods that had a Backend tupled in.