I'm back working on git-annex after a month away! It's good to be back, and I've made some decent improvements this week.

New features include a GIT_ANNEX_VECTOR_CLOCK environment variable that may be useful for those using git-annex in a HIPPA compliance setting, where timestamps are verboten (but verifying full compliance is up to you!), and remote.name.annex-ignore-command and remote.name.annex-sync-command configurations that let shell commands be run to vary what remotes are used depending on eg, what network it's on.

Also, I took a look at the external special remote protocol, and noticed two problems with it. First, keys with spaces in their names can't be used with it. This only affects the WORM backend, and it seems no one has ever run into the problem. Rather than complicate the implementation of external special remotes, I decided to deprecate having spaces in key names. Which is just asking for trouble anyway. So now there's a nice error message, and a migration path.

The other problem was that the external special remote documentation incorrectly said that a filename parameter never contained spaces. But in fact, there are situations where it can. This was not a problem with the protocol, but only with its documentation, and potentially with the implementation of some special remotes. So, I've spent some time today auditing every git-annex special remote that I know about. A few scripts that are bundled with git-annex were buggy and got fixed, and I filed bugs on 9 other external special remotes. A few did already get it right!

Today's work was sponsored by Trenton Cronholm on Patreon