After a release on Monday, I've spent the week working on
[[async extension to external special remote protocol|design/external_special_remote_protocol/async_appendix]].
This is lets a single external special remote process handle multiple
requests at the same time, when it's more efficient to use one process
than for git-annex to run several processes.

It's a good thing I added support for extensions a couple of years back.
I never imagined at the time using it for something like this, that
radically changes the whole protocol! It could have just been protocol
version 2, but then special remotes would be pushed towards using this by
default, which I don't want. It's probably overkill for most of them.

          J 4 CHECKPRESENT Key3
          J 5 CHECKPRESENT Key4
          J 6 REMOVE Key5
          J 4 CHECKPRESENT-SUCCESS Key3
          J 6 REMOVE-SUCCESS Key5
          J 5 CHECKPRESENT-FAILURE Key4

The protocol extension went through a bunch of iterations, ending up with
probably the simplest possible way to do it, a simple framing layer around
the main protocol. I started with rather a lot of rather hairy code and it
kind of all melted away as I refined the protocol down to that, which was
nice, although I also kind of wish I had been able to jump right to
the clean and simple end result.