It uses tailVerify to hash the file while it's being written.
This is able to sometimes avoid a separate checksum step. Although
if the file gets written quickly enough, tailVerify may not see it
get created before the write finishes, and the checksum still happens.
Testing with the directory special remote, incremental checksumming did
not happen. But then I disabled the copy CoW probing, and it did work.
What's going on with that is the CoW probe creates an empty file on
failure, then deletes it, and then the file is created again. tailVerify
will open the first, empty file, and so fails to read the content that
gets written to the file that replaces it.
The directory special remote really ought to be able to avoid needing to
use tailVerify, and while other special remotes could do things that
cause similar problems, they probably don't. And if they do, it just
means the checksum doesn't get done incrementally.
Sponsored-by: Dartmouth College's DANDI project
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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