My worry was that a preferred content expression that matches on metadata
would have removed the location log from cache, causing an expensive
re-read when a Seek action later checked the location log.
Especially when the --all optimisation in the previous commit
pre-cached the location log.
This also means that the --all optimisation could cache the metadata log
too, if it wanted too, but not currently done.
The cache is a list, with the most recently accessed file first. That
optimises it for the common case of reading the same file twice, eg a
get, examine, followed by set reads it twice. And sync --content reads the
location log 3 times in a row commonly.
But, as a list, it should not be made to be too long. I thought about
expanding it to 5 items, but that seemed unlikely to be a win commonly
enough to outweigh the extra time spent checking the cache.
Clearly there could be some further benchmarking and tuning here.
git-annex allows managing files with git, without checking the file
contents into git. While that may seem paradoxical, it is useful when
dealing with files larger than git can currently easily handle, whether due
to limitations in memory, checksumming time, or disk space.
For documentation, see doc/ or <https://git-annex.branchable.com/>
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