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Diffstat (limited to 'doc/design/assistant/blog/day_64__syncing_robustly.mdwn')
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diff --git a/doc/design/assistant/blog/day_64__syncing_robustly.mdwn b/doc/design/assistant/blog/day_64__syncing_robustly.mdwn new file mode 100644 index 000000000..ab0090b92 --- /dev/null +++ b/doc/design/assistant/blog/day_64__syncing_robustly.mdwn @@ -0,0 +1,33 @@ +Working toward getting the data syncing to happen robustly, +so a bunch of improvements. + +* Got unmount events to be noticed, so unplugging and replugging + a removable drive will resume the syncing to it. There's really no + good unmount event available on dbus in kde, so it uses a heuristic + there. +* Avoid requeuing a download from a remote that no longer has a key. +* Run a full scan on startup, for multiple reasons, including dealing with + crashes. + +Ran into a strange issue: Occasionally the assistant will run `git-annex +copy` and it will not transfer the requested file. It seems that +when the copy command runs `git ls-files`, it does not see the file +it's supposed to act on in its output. + +Eventually I figured out what's going on: When updating the git-annex +branch, it sets `GIT_INDEX_FILE`, and of course environment settings are +not thread-safe! So there's a race between threads that access +the git-annex branch, and the Transferrer thread, or any other thread +that might expect to look at the normal git index. + +Unfortunatly, I don't have a fix for this yet.. Git's only interface for +using a different index file is `GIT_INDEX_FILE`. It seems I have a lot of +code to tear apart, to push back the setenv until after forking every git +command. :( + +Before I figured out the root problem, I developed a workaround for the +symptom I was seeing. I added a `git-annex transferkey`, which is +optimised to be run by the assistant, and avoids running `git ls-files`, so +avoids the problem. While I plan to fix this environment variable problem +properly, `transferkey` turns out to be so much faster than how it was +using `copy` that I'm going to keep it. |