[[!comment format=mdwn
 username="Steve"
 ip="92.104.175.136"
 subject="Some free-form remote ideas"
 date="2012-10-21T02:07:40Z"
 content="""
This is starting to get interesting.  A free-form remote would definitely simplify my use case, and also solve the \"future goal\" of easily incorporating my already existing DVD-Rs.

I haven't really looked into the git-annex internals up to this point, but looking at the [[special_remotes/hook]] page there doesn't seem to be a hook for init which would be needed to populate git-annex's index of files in the remote.  (git-annex seems to assume that new special remotes are empty)

Another problem is where to store the hash to path relation information.  On a RW remote it would be stored in the remote, but here we need to keep it in the repo somehow.  This could be in the git-annex branch, or possibly another branch created specifically for this purpose.

1) initremote needs to:

* hash the contents of all the remote's files
* update git-annex's index of the remote's contents
* store the paths to the hashes in the repo

2) store and remove should just fail.

3) retrieve and check present seem straight forward.

The assistant blog mentions adding support for read only remotes but I don't know anything about it: [[design/assistant/blog/day_65__transfer_polish]] (I'm still on 3.20120605)

Let me know if there is anything I haven't thought of yet.

"""]]
