Update on 3 new features. Appropriate to the season, there's a past, a present, and a future one.
Past: The last release added git annex adjust --unlock-present
which might be just what you were looking for, if you used to use direct
mode. It unlocks files whose content is present, but files whose content is
missing are dangling symlinks. Currently, the branch is only refresh after
git-annex finishes all requested transfers. There is a
annex.adjustedbranchrefresh config that can make it refresh more
frequently, but doing it after every file may be too slow in a large repo.
I hope to speed it up enough eventually to perhaps make this the default
later in places where --unlock is currently used.
(That work was sponsored by Gioele Barabucci ENK)
Present: This week, I've been working on an internal protocol to comminicate about all console IO that git-annex does, so it can start some child processes to perform long-running tasks, like downloads. The goal is to ?detect stalled transfers and cancel or retry them. This is after previous attempts, at doing it using threads failed. I finished the IO serialization part today, but may put off the rest until a bit later.
(This work was sponsored by Jake Vosloo, Mark Reidenbach, and Graham Spencer on Patreon)
Future: We've been thinking about a ?borg special remote for a while, and last night I realized that something I implemented this summer for ?importing from special remote without downloading might be just what's needed for this new kind of remote. That was surprising! At the time, I had been doubtful about the new feature, since it seemed only the directory special remote would benefit from it at all.
The idea is the user runs a backup program, like borg, to store a copy of your git-annex repo, and then points git-annex at it, to learn what annexed content is stored in it. This is particularly exciting to me, because it's a whole new kind of special remote, and could be used for lots of backup programs beyond borg, and probably other stuff.
Imagine something like this:
borg init user@host:/annex.borg
borg create user@host:/annex.borg::{now} .git
git annex initremote borg type=borg repolocation=user@host:/annex.borg
git annex import --known --from borg
git annex drop --unused
And now all your old unused annex objects have been moved into the borg
repo, where they're efficiently stored with its data deduplication.
And of course, you can use git-annex get to get them from there.
I have a feeling I'll be haunted by this idea until I implement it..