Got caught up on some bug reports yesterday. The main one was odd behavior
of the assistant when the repository was in manual mode. A recent change to
the preferred content expression caused it. But the expression was not
broken. The problem was in the parser, which got the parentheses wrong
in this case. I had to mostly rewrite the parser, unfortunately. I've tested
the new one fairly extensively -- on the other hand this bug lurked in the
old parser for several years (this same code is used for matching files
with command-line parameters).

Just as I finished with that, I noticed another bug. Turns out git-cat-file
doesn't reload the index after it's started. So last week's changes to make
git-annex check the state of files in the index won't work when using the
assistant. Luckily there was an easy workaround for this.

Today I finished up some robustness fixes, and added to the test suite
checks for preferred content expressions, manual mode, etc.

I've started a stress test, syncing 2 repositories over XMPP, with the fuzz
tester running in each to create lots of changes to keep in sync.