30 lines
		
	
	
	
		
			1.5 KiB
			
		
	
	
	
		
			Markdown
		
	
	
	
	
	
			
		
		
	
	
			30 lines
		
	
	
	
		
			1.5 KiB
			
		
	
	
	
		
			Markdown
		
	
	
	
	
	
With yesterday's release, I'm pretty much done with the month's work. Since
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there was no particular goal this month, it's been a grab bag of features
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and bugfixes. Quite a lot of them in this last release.
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I'll be away the next couple of days.. But got a start today on the next
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part of the roadmap, which is planned to be all about Windows and Android
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porting. Today, it was all about lock files, mostly on Windows.
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Lock files on Windows are horrific. I especially like that programs that
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want to open a file, for any reason, are encouraged in the official
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documentation to retry repeatedly if it fails, because some other
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random program, like a virus checker, might have opened the file first.
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Turns out Windows does support a shared file read mode. This was
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just barely enough for me to implement both shared and exclusive
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file locking a-la-flock.
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Couldn't avoid a busy wait in a few places that block on a lock.
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Luckily, these are few, and the chances the lock will be taken for a long
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time is small. (I did think about trying to watch the file for close events
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and detect when the lock was released that way, but it seemed much too
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complicated and hard to avoid races.)
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Also, Windows only seems to support mandatory locks, while all locking in
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git-annex needs to be advisory locks. Ie, git-annex's locking shouldn't
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prevent a program from opening an annexed file! To work around that,
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I am using dedicated lock files on Windows.
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Also switched direct mode's annexed object locking to use dedicated lock
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files. AFAICS, this was pretty well broken in direct mode before.
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