i think it would be useful to have a fourth kind of [[special_remotes]]
that connects to a dumb storage using sftp or rsync. this can be emulated
by using sshfs, but that means lots of round-trips through the system and
is limited to platforms where sshfs is available.

typical use cases are backups to storate shared between a group of people
where each user only has limited access (sftp or rsync), when using
[[special_remotes/bup]] is not an option.

an alternative to implementing yet another special remote would be to have
some kind of plugin system by which external programs can provide an
interface to key-value stores (i'd implement the sftp backend myself, but
haven't learned haskell yet).

> Ask and ye [[shall receive|special_remotes/rsync]].
> 
> Sometimes I almost think that a generic configurable special remote that
> just uses configured shell commands would be useful.. But there's really
> no comparison with sitting down and writing code tuned to work with
> a given transport like rsync, when it comes to reliability and taking
> advantage of its abilities (like resuming). --[[Joey]]

>> big thanks, and bonus points for identical formats, so converting from
>> directory to rsync is just a matter of changing ``type`` from ``directory``
>> to ``rsync`` in ``.git-annex/remote.log`` and replacing the directory info
>> with ``annex-rsyncurl = <host>:<dir>`` in ``.git/config``. --[[chrysn]]

[[done]]
