This has tradeoffs, but is generally a win, and users who it causes git add to
slow down unacceptably for can just disable it again.
It needed to happen in an upgrade, since there are git-annex versions
that do not support it, and using such an old version with a v8
repository with filter.annex.process set will cause bad behavior.
By enabling it in v9, it's guaranteed that any git-annex version that
can use the repository does support it. Although, this is not a perfect
protection against problems, since an old git-annex version, if it's
used with a v9 repository, will cause git add to try to run
git-annex filter-process, which will fail. But at least, the user is
unlikely to have an old git-annex in path if they are using a v9
repository, since it won't work in that repository.
Sponsored-by: Dartmouth College's Datalad project
Based on my earlier benchmark, I have a rough cost model for how
expensive it is for git-annex smudge to be run on a file, vs
how expensive it is for a gigabyte of a file's content to be read and
piped through to filter-process.
So, using that cost model, it can decide if using filter-process will
be more or less expensive than running the smudge filter on the files to
be restaged.
It turned out to be *really* annoying to temporarily disable
filter-process. I did find a way, but urk, this is horrible. Notice
that, if it's interrupted with it disabled, it will remain disabled
until the next time restagePointerFile runs. Which could be some time
later. If the user runs `git add` or `git checkout` on a lot of small
files before that, they will see slower than expected performance.
(This commit also deletes where I wrote down the benchmark results
earlier.)
Sponsored-by: Noam Kremen on Patreon