[[!comment format=mdwn
 username="joey"
 subject="""comment 5"""
 date="2015-12-10T15:00:52Z"
 content="""
I'm concerned about that too. But it may be possible to finesse it,
when git-annex is running on a crippled filesystem, it may be able to
unlock all files as it gets content for them, producing a local fork.

The first difficulty would be avoiding or autoresolving conflicts
between locked and unlocked when merging changes into that fork. I think
this is very tractable; such a conflict comes down mostly to the symlink
bit in the tree object.

The real difficulty would be that any pushes from that fork would include
its change converting all files to unlocked. Although it's fairly mechanical
to convert such a commit into one that doesn't unlock files, so perhaps
that could be automated somehow on push or merge.

There's also a small and probably easy to implement git change that
would avoid all this complexity: If git's smudge filters were optionally
able to run on the link-text of symlinks, then a file could be unlocked
locally without changing what's in the repo and all the smudge stuff
would still work on it.

Crippled filesystems aside, I think there's value in being able to unlock
files across clones of a repo. For example, a repo could have a workflow
where the files for the current episiode/experiment/whatever start out
unlocked and are locked once it's complete.
"""]]