I'm excited by this new design ?accellerate ssh remotes with git-annex-shell mass protocol.

git-annex's use of rsync got transfers over ssh working quickly early on, but other than resuming interrupted transfers, using rsync doesn't really gain git-annex much, since annexed objects don't change over time. And rsync has always involved a certian amount of overhead that a custom protocol would avoid.

It's especially handy that such a protocol was already developed for git-annex p2p when using tor. I've not heard of a lot of people using that feature (but maybe people who do have reason not to talk about it), but it's a good solid thing, implemented very generically with a free monad, and reusing it for git-annex-shell would be great.