With yesterday's release, I'm pretty much done with the month's work. Since there was no particular goal this month, it's been a grab bag of features and bugfixes. Quite a lot of them in this last release.

I'll be away the next couple of days.. But got a start today on the next part of the roadmap, which is planned to be all about Windows and Android porting. Today, it was all about lock files, mostly on Windows.

Lock files on Windows are horrific. I especially like that programs that want to open a file, for any reason, are encouraged in the official documentation to retry repeatedly if it fails, because some other random program, like a virus checker, might have opened the file first.

Turns out Windows does support a shared file read mode. This was just barely enough for me to implement both shared and exclusive file locking a-la-flock.

Couldn't avoid a busy wait in a few places that block on a lock. Luckily, these are few, and the chances the lock will be taken for a long time is small. (I did think about trying to watch the file for close events and detect when the lock was released that way, but it seemed much too complicated and hard to avoid races.)

Also, Windows only seems to support mandatory locks, while all locking in git-annex needs to be advisory locks. Ie, git-annex's locking shouldn't prevent a program from opening an annexed file! To work around that, I am using dedicated lock files on Windows.

Also switched direct mode's annexed object locking to use dedicated lock files. AFAICS, this was pretty well broken in direct mode before.