a <!-- (a suggestion for introducing severity tags on bugs,
feel free to discard) --> issue: `git annex initremote` (in particular, adding
a key as described in [[encryption]] -- `git annex initremote my_remote
encryption=my_key`) seems to iterate over the `.git-annex/???/???/*.log` files
with lstat (tested using strace).

in a 50k key git-annex on a slow disk, this takes quite a while, while not
seeming necessary (it's just re-encrypting the shared secret, is it?).

could you verify the observed behavior?

> This is due to `git commit` being called. `git commit` exposes git's 
> rather innefficient handling of the index; in order to make a commit
> it has to write a new index file, and it does this by scanning every
> file in the repository. I think that git generally needs its index
> file handleing overhauled, particularly to deal with repositories with
> large numbers of files. git-annex is seems to already be running
> `git commit` in its most efficient mode, by specifying exactly what file
> to commit. [[done]] --[[Joey]]