This is necessary because as feared, the extra -n parameter that git-annex
passes breaks uses of these environment variables that expect exactly the
parameters that git passes.
For example, see https://github.com/datalad/datalad/issues/1456
It would of course be possible to pre-close stdin before running ssh so not
needing the -n, and I think that would not even break ssh's password
caching. But it would probably involve a lot of work, possibly would need
to deal with some layering violations, and would be error-prone. The really
clean fix would be to make all the ssh stuff return a CreateProcess, which
could have the handle closed when appropriate, but that would be a large
reworing of the code base.
This commit was supported by the NSF-funded DataLad project.
The former can be useful to make remotes that don't get fully synced with
local changes, which comes up in a lot of situations.
The latter was mostly added for symmetry, but could be useful (though less
likely to be).
Implementing `remote.<name>.annex-pull` was a bit tricky, as there's no one
place where git-annex pulls/fetches from remotes. I audited all
instances of "fetch" and "pull". A few cases were left not checking this
config:
* Git.Repair can try to pull missing refs from a remote, and if the local
repo is corrupted, that seems a reasonable thing to do even though
the config would normally prevent it.
* Assistant.WebApp.Gpg and Remote.Gcrypt and Remote.Git do fetches
as part of the setup process of a remote. The config would probably not
be set then, and having the setup fail seems worse than honoring it if it
is already set.
I have not prevented all the code that does a "merge" from merging branches
from remotes with remote.<name>.annex-pull=false. That could perhaps
be done, but it would need a way to map from branch name to remote name,
and the way refspecs work makes that hard to get really correct. So if the
user fetches manually, the git-annex branch will get merged, for example.
Anther way of looking at/justifying this is that the setting is called
"annex-pull", not "annex-merge".
This commit was supported by the NSF-funded DataLad project.
