Requires git 1.8.4 or newer. When it's installed, a background
git check-ignore process is run, and used to efficiently check ignores
whenever a new file is added.
Thanks to Adam Spiers, for getting the necessary support into git for this.
A complication is what to do about files that are gitignored but have
been checked into git anyway. git commands assume the ignore has been
overridden in this case, and not need any more overriding to commit a
changed version.
However, for the assistant to do the same, it would have to run git ls-files
to check if the ignored file is in git. This is somewhat expensive. Or it
could use the running git-cat-file process to query the file that way,
but that requires transferring the whole file content over a pipe, so it
can be quite expensive too, for files that are not git-annex
symlinks.
Now imagine if the user knows that a file or directory tree will be getting
frequent changes, and doesn't want the assistant to sync it, so gitignores
it. The assistant could overload the system with repeated ls-files checks!
So, I've decided that the assistant will not automatically commit changes
to files that are gitignored. This is a tradeoff. Hopefully it won't be a
problem to adjust .gitignore settings to not ignore files you want the
assistant to autocommit, or to manually git annex add files that are listed
in .gitignore.
(This could be revisited if git-annex gets access to an interface to check
the content of the index w/o forking a git command. This could be libgit2,
or perhaps a separate git cat-file --batch-check process, so it wouldn't
need to ship over the whole file content.)
This commit was sponsored by Francois Marier. Thanks!
Makes it safe to use git annex unlock with the watcher/assistant.
And also to mix use of the watcher/assistant with regular files stored in git.
Long ago, I had avoided doing this check, except during the startup scan,
because it would be slow to run ls-files repeatedly.
But then I added the lsof check, and to make that fast, got it to detect
batch file adds. So let's move the ls-files check to also occur when it'll
have a batch, and can check them all with one call.
This does slow down adding a single file by just a bit, but really only
a little bit. (The lsof check is probably more expensive.) It also
speeds up the startup scan, especially when there are lots of new files
found by the scan.
Also, fixed the sleep for annex.delayadd to not run while the threadstate
lock is held, so it doesn't unnecessarily freeze everything else.
Also, --force no longer makes it skip the lsof check, which was not
documented, and seems never a good idea.
