[[!comment format=mdwn
 username="joey"
 subject="""comment 2"""
 date="2017-01-30T16:11:04Z"
 content="""
What's really going on with `git status`:

* It runs `git annex smudge --clean`
* That ingests the file into the annex, but does not change what's staged at all.
* When you run `git diff`, it again cleans the file and displays
  the difference between what is staged (the unannexed file) and the
  cleaned version (the annexed file).
* Notice that if you run `git annex add file12 -c annex.largefiles=nothing`
  after this, the file gets staged in non-annexed file, as you'd expect.

So the only problem I see here is `git annex smudge --clean`
is ingesting a file into the annex when `git status` is not going to
update the working tree to use the pointer to that file. But the clean
hook interface doesn't provide it any way to know why git is asking for a
file to be cleaned, so it has to always do that.

If this is a small file suitable for being checked into git, the overhead of
having a copy of it in the annex shouldn't matter much, and annex.thin
will even make that copy be a hard link.

I suppose one way this could be improved is for `git annex smudge --clean`
to check if a file was checked into git as a non-annexed file before,
and then avoid cleaning it at all. But then if someone had a non-annexed
file and it got big and they wanted to add it annexed, such a change
would cause a problem..

Or git's smudge/clean interface could be improved so that the clean
filter can know why it's being called, and so avoid ingesting files
unnecessarily. IIRC my patch to improve the git interface did do that, but
unfortunately it's stalled getting accepted into git.
"""]]