[[!comment format=mdwn
 username="http://joeyh.name/"
 nickname="joey"
 subject="comment 1"
 date="2013-03-11T18:19:34Z"
 content="""
It does this to get the size of the url, so it can record this in the key. It would be possible to add a flag to skip that (--fast is already taken of course), but then you tend to get a lot of keys in your repository with no size info attached, which makes `git annex status` complain that it cannot tell you exactly how big your repo is, and is generally not the best. It also defeats annex.diskreserve checking, for example.

With --fast, the size is the only info available to ensure that the content behind the url has not changed when downloading it later. I suppose for some urls you may not want that checked, and so a --relaxed type option could make sense in that use case as well, although with the above caveat.
"""]]