I got bitten several times in the past by the fact that local preferred
content expressions are not violated (even temporarily) in order to
satisfy numcopies or other remotes' preferred content expressions.
Mostly in the form of the local repo not allowing arbitrary files in
(e.g. because it's set to only want `present` files). This note I add
here explains how to get out of this situation with
`approxlackingcopies=1`.
It might be too specific for this manpage, but I didn't find a better
place to put it.
Eg when the destination is logged as containing a file, skip
actively checking that it does contain it.
Note that --fast does not prevent other verifications of content
location that are done in a copy --from --to. Perhaps it could, but this
change will already avoid the real unnecessary work of operating on
files that are already in the remote.
And avoiding other verifications
might cause it to fail if the location log thinks that --to does not
contain the content but does. Such complications with `git-annex copy
--to remote --fast` led to commit d006586cd0
which added a note that gets displayed when that fails, mentioning it
might be due to --fast being enabled.
copy --from --to is already complicated enough without needing to worry
about such edge cases, so continuing to doing some verification of
content location after the initial --fast filtering seems ok.
Sponsored-by: Dartmouth College's DANDI project