Sometimes it may happen that you have multiple git-annex repositories
with the same UUID. This is usually because you did something special,
like copying a repository with `cp -a` or `dd` instead of cloning it,
or you just replaced a drive with a fresh one. In my case, the latter
happened: I ran out of space on my media drive and replaced it with a
larger drive. Since it had multiple git-annex repositories (and data
*not* managed by git-annex), I simply used `rsync` to copy the drive
over, which created duplicate git-annex repositories with the same
UUIDs.

It may still be useful to reuse those repositories as distinct
entities, and it is therefore important to assign new UUIDs to those
cloned repositories so that content tracking works properly and you do
not lose data.

In this case, you actually do *not* want to specify an existing UUID
when you run reinit: you want git-annex to generate a new one for
you. So, in that context, I've always wondered why
[[git-annex-reinit]] absolutely requires an argument.  I understand
there may be *other* use cases where you may want to `reinit` a
repository to an existing UUID, but that seems like a much *less*
common use case, and one that may bring more trouble than is worth.

So I believe there should be an easy way to assign a fresh new UUID to
a repository. `reinit` should allow doing that when no arguments are
given: it should show the old and new UUID and maybe a warning message
indicating that tracking information may be wrong now if the old UUID
is not in use anymore.

As shown below, I also wonder if `reinit` should recommend the user
perform a `fsck` to make sure the location logs reflect the change...

Workaround
----------

It is obviously possible to assign a new UUID with the current
command, by generating one by hand.

Git-annex doesn't have a user-visible way of generating a new UUID, so
we'll have to improvise something. It uses the
[Data.UUID](https://hackage.haskell.org/package/uuid-1.3.13/docs/Data-UUID.html)
Haskell module, in V4 mode, which is the [standard, random
way](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universally_unique_identifier#Version_4_.28random.29)
of generating UUIDs. I believe that the `uuidgen` command, when ran in
`--random` mode, will produce similarly unique UUIDs that are good
enough for our purpose. So I have used this to reassign new UUIDs to
cloned copies of repositories:

    git annex reinit $(uuidgen)

The next step is to fix the location log so that the UUID change is
reflected in the tracking information:

    git annex fsck --fast

You may also want to set a new description for the new clone:

    git annex describe here "bare 2TB Seagate barracuda HD"

Then, optionally, you will want to propagate that change to other
repositories:

    git annex sync

Thanks for any feedback or comments... -- [[anarcat]]