Putting the transfer on the currentTransfers atomically introduced a bug:
It checks to see if the transfer is in progress, and cancels it.
Fixed by moving that check inside the STM transaction.
This may be customised differently than the main page later on, but
for now the important thing is that this constantly refreshed page does not
allocate a new NotificationHandle each time it's loaded.
WebApp now shows changes with no delay. Comparing a running git-annex get
and the webapp side-by-side, they both show each new transfer at the same
time.
The fun part was making it move things from TransferQueue to currentTransfers
entirely atomically. Which will avoid inconsistent display if the WebApp
renders the current status at just the wrong time. STM to the rescue!
I've convinced myself that nothing in DaemonStatus can deadlock,
as it always keepts the TMVar full. That was the only reason it was in the
Annex monad.
This is a way to send a notification to a set of clients, any of which can be
blocked waiting for a new notification to arrive. A complication is that any
number of clients may be be dead, and we don't want stale notifications for
those clients to pile up and leak memory.
It took me 3 tries to find the solution, which turns out to be simple: An array
of SampleVars, one per client. Using SampleVars means that clients only see the
most recent notification, but when the notification is just "the assistant's
state changed somehow; display a refreshed rendering of it", that's sufficient.
This avoids forking another process, avoids polling, fixes a race,
and avoids a rare forkProcess thread hang that I saw once time
when starting the webapp.
