Dealing with a race without using locking is exceedingly difficult and tricky.
Fully tested, I hope.
There are three places left where the branch can be updated, that are not
covered by the race recovery code. Let's prove they're all immune to the
race:
1. tryFastForwardTo checks to see if a fast-forward can be done,
and then does git-update-ref on the branch to fast-forward it.
If a push comes in before the check, then either no fast-forward
will be done (ok), or the push set the branch to a ref that can
still be fast-forwarded (also ok)
If a push comes in after the check, the git-update-ref will
undo the ref change made by the push. It's as if the push did not come
in, and the next git-push will see this, and try to re-do it.
(acceptable)
2. When creating the branch for the very first time, an empty index
is created, and a commit of it made to the branch. The commit's ref
is recorded as the current state of the index. If a push came in
during that, it will be noticed the next time a commit is made to the
branch, since the branch will have changed. (ok)
3. Creating the branch from an existing remote branch involves making
the branch, and then getting its ref, and recording that the index
reflects that ref.
If a push creates the branch first, git-branch will fail (ok).
If the branch is created and a racing push is then able to change it
(highly unlikely!) we're still ok, because it first records the ref into
the index.lck, and then updating the index. The race can cause the
index.lck to have the old branch ref, while the index has the newly pushed
branch merged into it, but that only results in an unnecessary update of
the index file later on.
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.
