I had not realized what a memory leak the lazy state monad could be,
although I have not seen much evidence of actual leaking in git-annex.
However, if running git-annex on a great many files, this could matter.
The additional Utility.State.changeState adds even more strictness,
avoiding a problem I saw in github-backup where repeatedly modifying
state built up a huge pile of thunks.
In git, a Ref can be a Sha, or a Branch, or a Tag. I added type aliases for
those. Note that this does not prevent mixing up of eg, refs and branches
at the type level. Since git really doesn't care, except rare cases like
git update-ref, or git tag -d, that seems ok for now.
There's also a tree-ish, but let's just use Ref for it. A given Sha or Ref
may or may not be a tree-ish, depending on the object type, so there seems
no point in trying to represent it at the type level.
Many functions took the repo as their first parameter. Changing it
consistently to be the last parameter allows doing some useful things with
currying, that reduce boilerplate.
In particular, g <- gitRepo is almost never needed now, instead
use inRepo to run an IO action in the repo, and fromRepo to get
a value from the repo.
This also provides more opportunities to use monadic and applicative
combinators.
