Updated the Debian stable backport to the last release. Also it seems that the last release unexpectedly fixed XMPP SIGILL on some OSX machines. Apparently when I rebuilt all the libraries recently, it somehow fixed that ?old unsolved bug.

RichiH suggested "wrt ballooning memory on repair: can you read in broken stuff and simply stop reading once you reach a certain threshold, then start repairing, re-run fsck, etc?" .. I had considered that but was not sure it would work. I think I've gotten it to work.

Now working on a design for using a caching database for some parts of git-annex. My initial benchmarks using SQLite indicate it would slow down associated file lookups by nearly an order of magnitude compared with the current ".map files" implementation. (But would scale better in edge cases). OTOH, using a SQLite database to index metadata for use in views looks very promising.