I've seen the [[tips/using box.com as a special remote]] for using mounted WebDAV remote directory for storage of the tracked files.

It's quite close to a scenario familiar to me, although with a difference.

Let me describe my situation.

I worked on a supplement to a set of textbooks. My work was dependent on the revision of the textbooks (for correct references, etc.). The textbooks were being edited by the author, and published in a WebDAV directory.

So I set up a Git repo for my work, and also a branch to track the revisions of the textbooks which [I updated by copying them from the WebDAV directory (after mounting it)](http://unix.stackexchange.com/q/25015/4319). The branch where my work was in was either based on the textbooks branch (and rebased/merged and edited to reflect the changes in the new revisions of the textbooks when needed) or contained the repo with textbooks as a submodule.

The textbooks were large files, so I didn't want them be a part of the Git repo with my supplement work when I publish the repo. But I wanted for those who looked into my public repo to understand how to get the textbooks I'm referring to.

I haven't solved this problem for myself completely. Now I see I could use git-annex for this. I t would track the state of the textbooks in the repo, without actually storing them there, and whenever one would need to get the missing textbooks in a clone of the repo, git-annex could handle the download from the WebDAV directory for him, right?

I simply wrote down the rules for reproducing these downloading and saving operations, together with source URL (as a [Makefile](https://gitorious.org/primary-school-informatics-problems/received_2011-11-mathinf-initial-edition/blobs/RULES/Makefile)):

whenever I wanted to update the revisions of the textbooks (or to download them the first time), I would checkout the branch which included this Makefile and was for holding the textbooks, and the run:

    make get

-- this target had the temporary mountpoint for the remote directory as prerequisite, and there was a rule to create it, and mount the specified URL at it; then it would sync the files, and I could use Git to track the changes. After I was done inspecting the remote directory, I had to clean up the temporary mountpoint fby unmounting and deleting it. I didn't make it do this automatically after a `get` operation for performance reasons (caching of the remote directory would help if I wanted to access it once again).

So, this differs from [[tips/using box.com as a special remote]] in that the tip for WebDAV suggest to handle the mounting manually, and git-annex knows nothing about the WebDAV URL where the content comes from.

So here's my wish: a [[special remote|special remotes]] to track the WebDAV URLs in the repo, and mount the remote directory automatically under the hood, whenever one wants to get a file from there. (Then I assume it should also unmount it immediately in order to clean up after itself, despite possible inefficiencies).