Starting the new year with new git-annex development funding for most of the things on the roadmap!

Today was spent converting the UUID data type to use a ByteString, rather than a String, and also converting repo descriptions to ByteString. That's groundwork for reading and writing log files on the git-annex branch using attoparsec and ByteString builders, which will hopefully improve performance.

Until that's complete, it will often convert a String to a ByteString and then back to a String, which could actually make performance slightly worse. Benchmarking git annex whereis doesn't find much of a change. It may have gotten a slightly faster overall, due to the faster Eq and Ord instances making the map of repositories faster.