I released a version of git-annex over the weekend that includes the git
annex watch command. There's a minor issue installing it from cabal on
OSX, which I've fixed in my tree. Nice timing: At least the watch command
should be shipped in the next Debian release, which freezes at the end of
the month.
Jimmy found out how kqueue blows up when there are too many directories to keep all open. I'm not surprised this happens, but it's nice to see exactly how. Odd that it happened to him at just 512 directories; I'd have guessed more. I have plans to fork watcher programs that each watch 512 directories (or whatever the ulimit is), to deal with this. What a pitiful interface is kqueue.. I have not thought yet about how the watcher programs would communicate back to the main program.
Back on the assistant front, I've worked today on making git syncing more robust. Now when a push fails, it tries a pull, and a merge, and repushes. That ensures that the push is, almost always, a fast-forward. Unless something else gets in a push first, anyway!
If a push still fails, there's Yet Another Thread, added today, that will wake up after 30 minutes and retry the push. It currently keeps retrying every 30 minutes until the push finally gets though. This will deal, to some degree, with those situations where a remote is only sometimes available.
I need to refine the code a bit, to avoid it keeping an ever-growing queue of failed pushes, if a remote is just dead. And to clear old failed pushes from the queue when a later push succeeds.
I also need to write a git merge driver that handles conflicts in the tree.
If two conflicting versions of a file foo are saved, this would merge
them, renaming them to foo.X and foo.Y. Probably X and Y are the
git-annex keys for the content of the files; this way all clones will
resolve the conflict in a way that leads to the same tree. It's also
possible to get a conflict by one repo deleting a file, and another
modifying it. In this case, renaming the deleted file to foo.Y may
be the right approach, I am not sure.
I glanced through some Haskell dbus bindings today. I belive there are dbus events available to detect when drives are mounted, and on Linux this would let git-annex notice and sync to usb drives, etc.
That's a good question. Unfortunatly they cannot; X and Y need to be stable across repositories, and git remotes can have different names in different repositories.
Even using the description that git-annex stores for each repository for X and Y is problematic, since that description can change, and so could be different in two repos that are each trying to resolve the same merge conflict.