Below is a test case which shows a way that the git-annex branch can become corrupted and lose data, including location log records and uuid.log lines. At the end, a commit on the git-annex branch removes one of the 2 lines from the uuid.log; which should never happen. The actual problem occurs earlier, at the "push point". Here a repo is cloned from the main one, initialized (adding the last uuid.log line), and then pushed back to the main one. That push is a fast-forward, so is allowed to directly update the git-annex branch in the main repo: b884fe5..c497739 git-annex -> git-annex Now the git-annex branch has a change that is not reflected in `.git/annex/index`, so the next time a change is made, it's committed using the out of date index, which causes a reversion of the changes that were pushed to the branch. --- ## Thoughts This is essentially the same reason why git blocks pushes to the checked-out branch of a non-bare repository. This problem only affects workflows that involve pushing. Pulling workflows do not directly update the local git-annex branch, so avoid the problem. And while bare repos are pushed to, they rarely have changes made directly to their git-annex branches, so while I think the same problem could happen with pushing to a bare repo, it's unlikely. None of which is to say this is not a bad bug that needs to be comprehensively fixed. Probably git-annex needs to record which ref of the git-annex branch corresponds to its index, and if the branch is at a different ref, merge it into the index. > And now that's [[done]]. I managed to do it with very little slowdown. > > A side benefit is that users can now safely check out the git-annex > branch and commit changes to it, and git-annex will notice them. > Before, it was documented to ignore such changes. > --[[Joey]] --- ## Workaround Users who want to prevent this bug from occuring when pushing to their non-bare repositories can install this script as `.git/hooks/update`
#!/bin/sh
if [ "$1" = refs/heads/git-annex ]; then
	exit 1
fi
--[[Joey]] --- ## Test Case
#!/bin/sh
mkdir annextest
cd annextest

git init dir1
cd dir1
git annex init
touch foo 
echo hi > bar
git annex add
git commit -m add

cd ..
git clone dir1 dir2
cd dir2
git annex init otherdir
git annex get
# push point
git push

cd ..
cd dir1
echo "before"
git show git-annex:uuid.log
git annex drop foo --force
echo "after"
git show git-annex:uuid.log