Worked today on two action items from my last blog post:

• on-disk transfers in progress information files (read/write/enumerate)
• locking for the files, so redundant transfer races can be detected, and failed transfers noticed

That's all done, and used by the get, copy, and move subcommands.

Also, I made git-annex status use that information to display any file transfers that are currently in progress:

joey@gnu:~/lib/sound/misc>git annex status
[...]
transfers in progress: 
    downloading Vic-303.mp3 from leech

(Webapp, here we come!)

However... Files being sent or received by git-annex-shell don't yet have this transfer info recorded. The problem is that to do so, git-annex-shell will need to be run with a --remote= parameter. But old versions will of course fail when run with such an unknown parameter.

This is a problem I last faced in December 2011 when adding the --uuid= parameter. That time I punted and required the remote git-annex-shell be updated to a new enough version to accept it. But as git-annex gets more widely used and packaged, that's becoming less an option. I need to find a real solution to this problem.