From 006e5e7fea3925cd1f4c650cf42b020520742d70 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Joey Hess Date: Thu, 11 Sep 2014 16:12:56 -0400 Subject: devblog and look back over the past year --- .../day_219__catching_up_and_looking_back.mdwn | 109 +++++++++++++++++++++ 1 file changed, 109 insertions(+) create mode 100644 doc/devblog/day_219__catching_up_and_looking_back.mdwn (limited to 'doc/devblog/day_219__catching_up_and_looking_back.mdwn') diff --git a/doc/devblog/day_219__catching_up_and_looking_back.mdwn b/doc/devblog/day_219__catching_up_and_looking_back.mdwn new file mode 100644 index 000000000..8d82d8cb9 --- /dev/null +++ b/doc/devblog/day_219__catching_up_and_looking_back.mdwn @@ -0,0 +1,109 @@ +Yesterday and today were the first good solid days working on git-annex in a +while. There's a big backlog, currently of 133 messages, so I have been +concentrating on bug reports first. Happily, not many new bugs have been +reported lately, and I've made good progress on them, fixing 5 bugs today, +including a file descriptor leak. + +## catching up + +In this end of summer rush, I've been too busy to blog for the past 20 days, +but not entirely too busy to work on git-annex. Two releases have been made +in that time, and a fair amount of improvements worked on. + +Including a new feature: When a local git repository is cloned with `git +clone --shared`, git-annex detects this and defaults to a special mode +where file contents get hard linked into the clone. It also makes the cloned +repository be untrusted, to avoid confusing numcopies counting with the +hard links. This can be useful for temporary working repositories without +the overhead of lots of copies of files. + +## looking back + +I want to look back further, over the crowdfunded year of work covered +by this devblog. There were a lot of things I wanted to accomplish this +past year, and I managed to get to most of them. As well as a few surprises. + +* Windows support improved more than I guessed in my wildest dreams. + git-annex went from working not too well on the command line to + being pretty solid there, as well as having a working + and almost polished webapp on Windows. + There are still warts -- it's Windows after all! + +* Android didn't get many improvements. Most of the time I had budgeted to + Android porting ended up being used on Windows porting instead. I did, + however, get the Android build environment cleaned up a lot from the initial + hacked together one, and generally kept it building and working on Android. + +* The [direct mode guard](http://git-annex.branchable.com/devblog/day_48__direct_mode_guard_design/) + was not planned, but the need for it became clear, and + it's dramatically reduced the amount of command-line foot-shooting + that goes on in direct mode. + +* Repository repair was planned, and I've very proud of [git-repair](http://git-repair.branchable.com/). + Also pleased with the webapp's UI for scheduling repository consistency + checks. + Always room for improvement in this kind of thing, but this brings a new + capability to both git and git-annex. + +* The [[external_special_remote_interface|special_remotes/external]] came + together beautifully. External special remotes are now just as well + supported as built-in ones, except the webapp cannot be used to configure + them. + +* Using git-remote-gcrypt for fully encrypted git repositories, including + support in the webapp for setting them (and gpg keys if necessary), + happened. Still needs testing/more use/improvements. Avoided doing + much in the area of gpg key management, which is probably good to avoid when + possible, but is probably needed to make this a really suitable option for + end users. + +* Telehash is still being built, and it's not clear if they've gotten it + to work at all yet. The v2 telehash has recently been superseded by a + a new v3. So I am not pleased that I didn't get git-annex working with + telehash, but it was outside my control. This is a problem that needs to get + solved outside git-annex first, either by telehash or something else. + The plan is to keep an eye on everything in this space, including for example, + Maidsafe. + +* In the meantime, the new notifychanges support in git-annex-shell + makes XMPP/telehash/whatever unnecessary in a lot of configurations. + git-annex's remotedaemon architecture supports that and is designed + to support other notification methods later. And the webapp has a lot of + improvements in the area of setting up ssh remotes, so fewer users will + be stuck with XMPP. + +* I didn't quite get to [[design/assistant/deltas]], but the final month + of work on chunking provides a lot of new features and hopefully a + foundation that will get to deltas eventually. There is a new haskell + library that's being developed with the goal of being used for git-annex + deltas. + +* I hadn't planned to make git-annex be able to upgrade itself, when installed + from this website. But there was a need for that, and so it happened. + Even got a gpg key trust path for the distribution of git-annex. + +* Metadata driven views was an entirely unplanned feature. The current + prototype is very exciting, it opens up entire new use cases. + I had to hold myself back to not work on it too much, + especially as it shaded into adding a caching database to git-annex. + Had too much other stuff planned to do all I wanted. + Clearly this is an area I want to spend more time on! + +Those are most of the big features and changes, but probably half +of my work on git-annex this past year was in smaller things, and general +maintenance. Lots of others have contributed, some with +code (like the large effort to switch to bootstrap3), +and others with documentation, bug reports, etc. + +Perhaps it's best to turn to `git diff --stat` to sum up the activity +and see just how much both the crowdfunding campaign and +the previous kickstarter have pushed git-annex into high gear: + + campaign: 5410 files changed, 124159 insertions(+), 79395 deletions(-) + kickstarter: 4411 files changed, 123262 insertions(+), 13935 deletions(-) + year before: 1281 files changed, 7263 insertions(+), 55831 deletions(-) + +What's next? The hope is, no more crowdfunded campaigns where I have +to promise the moon anytime soon. Instead, the goal is to move to a more +mature and sustainable funding model, and continue to grow the git-annex +community, and the spaces where it's useful. -- cgit v1.2.3