There are several places where it's assumed a key can be written on one
line. One is in the format of the .git/annex/unused files. The difficult
one is that filenames derived from keys are fed into git cat-file --batch,
which has a line based input. (And no -z option.)
So, for now it's best to block such keys being created.
When storing content in bare repositories, use the hashDirLower
directories. Bare repositories can be on USB drives, which might
use the FAT filesystem, and fall afoul of recent bugs in linux's handling
of mixed case on FAT. Using hashDirLower avoids that.
The only fully supported thing is to have the main repository on one disk,
and .git/annex on another. Only commands that move data in/out of the annex
will need to copy it across devices.
There is only partial support for putting arbitrary subdirectories of
.git/annex on different devices. For one thing, but this can require more
copies to be done. For example, when .git/annex/tmp is on one device, and
.git/annex/journal on another, every journal write involves a call to
mv(1). Also, there are a few places that make hard links between various
subdirectories of .git/annex with createLink, that are not handled.
In the common case without cross-device, the new moveFile is actually
faster than renameFile, avoiding an unncessary stat to check that a file
(not a directory) is being moved. Of course if a cross-device move is
needed, it is as slow as mv(1) of the data.
It would be nice if command-specific options were supported. The first
difficulty is that which command is being called is not known until after
getopt; but that could be worked around by finding the first non-dashed
parameter. Storing the settings without putting them in the annex monad is
the next difficulty; it could perhaps be handled by making the seek stage
pass applicable settings into the start stage (and from there on to perform
as needed). But that still leaves a problem, what data type to use to
represent the options between getopt and seek?