This has not been tested at all. It compiles!
The only known missing things are support for encryption, and for get/set
of special remote configuration, and of key state. (The latter needs
separate work to add a new per-key log file to store that state.)
Only thing I don't much like is that initremote needs to be passed both
type=external and externaltype=foo. It would be better to have just
type=foo
Most of this is quite straightforward code, that largely wrote itself given
the types. The only tricky parts were:
* Need to lock the remote when using it to eg make a request, because
in theory git-annex could have multiple threads that each try to use
a remote at the same time. I don't think that git-annex ever does
that currently, but better safe than sorry.
* Rather than starting up every external special remote program when
git-annex starts, they are started only on demand, when first used.
This will avoid slowdown, especially when running fast git-annex query
commands. Once started, they keep running until git-annex stops, currently,
which may not be ideal, but it's hard to know a better time to stop them.
* Bit of a chicken and egg problem with caching the cost of the remote,
because setting annex-cost in the git config needs the remote to already
be set up. Managed to finesse that.
This commit was sponsored by Lukas Anzinger.
6c565ec905