[[!comment format=mdwn
 username="joey"
 subject="""comment 7"""
 date="2017-05-11T15:57:10Z"
 content="""
Note that the analysis in my earlier comment assumes that the
.git/annex/objects/xx/yy/key/ directory is removed. As long as those
per-key directories are used, the symlinks cannot possibly be made short enough
to pack.

There have been some
other requests for that (datalad requested it because all those per-key
directories use disk space, add to the size of the git repo, and slow down
traversal). However, git-annex relies on those directories to prevent
accidential rm -rf deleting the annexed objects and prevent some symlink
following programs from editing/corrupting the annexed objects (the
per-key directories are left mode 400 most of the time). So it would be
fairly complicated to add a tuning that eliminated those while locking
down the permissions some other way (eg, making the `yy` directories mode
400 except when one or more thread/process needs to write to them), and since
it would have to be a tuning, it would introduce a lot of conditional
complexity into the code.
"""]]
