[lug] large file management

[Davide Del Vento]

>> Shortlist of stuff which I will look/consider more:
>> - Unison
>> - boar
>> - OpenKM
>> - subversion
>> - git annex
>
> Definitely look at git annex.  Your use case is a lot like one Joey
> considered when he started writing it.  There's also a web front end (git
> annex assistant?) to make it easy for "regular" people to use it.

Yes, I'm definitely looking at it. I'm finding it much more complex
than I thought at first (e.g. have to unlock files before changing,
having to manually add them to git-annex but not git itself when
modified before committing) on top of the already complicated git
workflow (it's no mystery that I like hg better -- by the way I
checked mercurial-largefiles and that is not what I want). But I am
not ruling it out, at least not yet.

There is a fundamental thing that I'd like to do with git-annex and I
can't figure out how: while having only some repos available (possibly
only one) deciding that some files aren't worth keeping anywhere and
asking for them to be deleted from all the repos the next time I sync.
With rsync, I just write a "note to self" in the repo I'm editing,
which says something like "use --delete the next time you rsync". This
is unnerving, though, because when I do this I have to be careful that
I'm not deleting some other file just for space purposes, which is
something I also like to do (and which git-annex does with the --drop
option). Basically I'm looking for a suboption of --drop that would
say --on-all-remotes and can't find it. You may say "but this is not
how version control is supposed to work, you don't want to completely
delete something everywhere", and you'd be right. But this is not
"normal version control", these are pictures which I initially dumped
from the camera, synched among repos, and then realizing they were
crap and are not worth keeping. That's my workflow, I seldom have time
to look at the pictures before synching and therefore I would like an
easy (but clear and unmistakable) way to delete them from everywhere
(even when "everywhere" isn't available -- of course the actual
deletion will happen at the next synch, not "immediately", but I can
consider them gone "mentally").

Not sure if I was clear enough... I'm already sleeping :-)

Thanks for any suggestions,
Dav