Dealing with a race without using locking is exceedingly difficult and tricky.
Fully tested, I hope.
There are three places left where the branch can be updated, that are not
covered by the race recovery code. Let's prove they're all immune to the
race:
1. tryFastForwardTo checks to see if a fast-forward can be done,
and then does git-update-ref on the branch to fast-forward it.
If a push comes in before the check, then either no fast-forward
will be done (ok), or the push set the branch to a ref that can
still be fast-forwarded (also ok)
If a push comes in after the check, the git-update-ref will
undo the ref change made by the push. It's as if the push did not come
in, and the next git-push will see this, and try to re-do it.
(acceptable)
2. When creating the branch for the very first time, an empty index
is created, and a commit of it made to the branch. The commit's ref
is recorded as the current state of the index. If a push came in
during that, it will be noticed the next time a commit is made to the
branch, since the branch will have changed. (ok)
3. Creating the branch from an existing remote branch involves making
the branch, and then getting its ref, and recording that the index
reflects that ref.
If a push creates the branch first, git-branch will fail (ok).
If the branch is created and a racing push is then able to change it
(highly unlikely!) we're still ok, because it first records the ref into
the index.lck, and then updating the index. The race can cause the
index.lck to have the old branch ref, while the index has the newly pushed
branch merged into it, but that only results in an unnecessary update of
the index file later on.
The last branch ref that the index was updated to is stored in
.git/annex/index.lck, and the index only updated when the current
branch ref differs.
(The .lck file should later be used for locking too.)
Some more optimization is still needed, since there is some redundancy in
calls to git show-ref.
Always merge the git-annex branch into .git/annex/index before making a
commit from the index.
This ensures that, when the branch has been changed in any way
(by a push being received, or changes pulled directly into it, or
even by the user checking it out, and committing a change), the index
reflects those changes.
This is much too slow; it needs to be optimised to only update the
index when the branch has really changed, not every time.
Also, there is an unhandled race, when a change is made to the branch
right after the index gets updated. I left it in for now because it's
unlikely and I didn't want to complicate things with additional locking
yet.
Needed due to this scenario: Bare repo origin is made, foo is cloned from it;
foo is initalized; a file is added to foo's annex; git annex move --to origin
Since the git-annex branch has not yet been pushed to origin, it doesn't
auto-initialize. When the content is sent to it, it's stored, but
the remote has NoUUID, and so nothing is logged in the location log.
Then the content is removed from the local repo, and git-annex has lost
track of it.
git annex fsck in origin will find the lost content, but let's not let this
happen. Content should only be sent to initalized remotes.
This cannot happen for non-local remotes, since git-annex-shell always
checks that the repo is initialized.
Added files don't have to be committed before they can be unannexed.
unannex no longer commits existing staged changes
unannex of the last file in a directory now works, before it failed because
git rm deleted the directory out from under it,