Working on a "filterdriver" branch, I've implemented support for the long-running smudge/clean process interface.

It works, but not really any better than the old smudge/clean interface. Unfortunately git leaks memory just as badly in the new interface as it did in the old interface when sending large data to the smudge filter. Also, the new interface requires that the clean filter read all the content of the file from git, even when it's just going to look at the file on disk, so that's worse performance.

So, I don't think I'll be merging that branch yet, but git's interface does support adding capabilities, and perhaps a capability could be added that avoids it schlepping the file content over the pipe. Same as my old git patches tried to do with the old smudge/clean interface.

This work is supported by the NSF-funded DataLad project.