It was rather easy to implement git-annex-shell p2pstdio, the P2P
protocol implementation done for tor is quite generic and easy to adapt for
this.
The only complication was that git-annex-shell has a readonly mode, so the protocol server needed modifications to support that. Well, there's also some innefficiency around unnecessary verification of transferred content in some cases, which will probably need extensions to the P2P protocol later.
Also wrote up some documentation of what the P2P protocol looks like, for anyone who might want to communiate with git-annex-shell using it, for some reason, and doesn't understand Haskell and free monads. P2P protocol
While comparing the code of the P2P server and git-annex-shell commands, I
noticed that the P2P server didn't check inAnnex when locking content,
while git-annex-shell lockcontent did check inAnnex. This turned out to
be a ugly data loss bug involving direct mode repositories, where a
modified direct mode file was allowed when locking a key in the repository.
Turned out that the bug happened when locking a file over tor to drop it
locally, but also when locking a file locally in a direct mode repository
to allow dropping it from any remote.
Very glad I noticed that, and I've changed the API to prevent that class of bug. I feel this is not a severe data loss bug, because when a direct mode repository is involved, dropping from somewhere and then modifying the file in the direct mode repository can have the same effect of losing the old copy. The bug just made data loss happen when running the same operations in the other order.
Next will be making git-annex use this new git-annex-shell feature when available.
Today's work was sponsored by Trenton Cronholm on Patreon