The only price paid is one additional MVar read per write to the journal.
Presumably writing a journal file dominiates over a MVar read time by
several orders of magnitude.
--batch does not get the speedup because then it needs to notice when
another process has made a change. Also made the assistant and other damon
modes bypass the optimisation, which would not help them anyway.
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.)
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.
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.
