This module contains plain tree indexing code. The index itself is a CACHE: you should only ever use it as an optimisation and never as a primary storage. In practice, this means that when we change index format, the application is expected to throw the old index away and build a fresh index. Please note that tracking index validity is out of scope for this library: this is responsibility of your application. It is advisable that in your validity tracking code, you also check for format validity (see indexFormatValid) and scrap and re-create index when needed.
The index is a binary file that overlays a hashed tree over the working copy. This means that every working file and directory has an entry in the index, that contains its path and hash and validity data. The validity data is a last seen timestamp plus the file size. The file hashes are sha256's of the file's content.
There are two entry types, a file entry and a directory entry. Both have a
common binary format (see Item
). The on-disk format is best described by
peekItem
.
For each file, the index has a copy of the timestamp taken at the instant
when the hash has been computed. This means that when file size and
timestamp of a file in working copy matches those in the index, we assume
that the hash stored in the index for given file is valid. These hashes are
then exposed in the resulting Tree
object, and can be leveraged by eg.
diffTrees
to compare many files quickly.
You may have noticed that we also keep hashes of directories. These are assumed to be valid whenever the complete subtree has had valid timestamps. At any point, as soon as a size or timestamp mismatch is found, the working file in question is opened, its hash (and timestamp and size) is recomputed and updated in-place in the index file (everything lives at a fixed offset and is fixed size, so this isn't an issue). This is also true of directories: when a file in a directory changes hash, this triggers recomputation of all of its parent directory hashes; moreover this is done efficiently -- each directory is updated at most once during a run.
Documentation
readIndex :: FilePath -> (Tree -> Hash) -> IO TreeSource
Read an index and build up a Tree
object from it, referring to current
working directory. Any parts of the index that are out of date are updated
in-place. The result is always an up-to-date index. Also, the Tree
is
stubby and only the pieces of the index that are expanded will be actually
updated! To implement a subtree query, you can use Tree.filter
and then
expand the result. Otherwise just expand the whole tree to avoid unexpected
problems.
readOrUpgradeIndex :: FilePath -> (Tree -> Hash) -> IO Tree -> IO TreeSource
DEPRECATED! Read index (just like readIndex). However, also check that the index version matches our expectations and if not, rebuild it from the reference (which is provided in form of un-executed action; we will only execute it when needed).
indexFormatValid :: FilePath -> IO BoolSource
Check that a given file is an index file with a format we can handle. You should remove and re-create the index whenever this is not true.