This option is not specific to sync, so it seemed it should be in either
pull or push as well as sync. Since it does modify the remote, it seems
better to have it in push; the modification of the local repo pulls in
the direction of pull, but not hard enough.
Maybe it would be better to have it in both?
Sponsored-by: Luke Shumaker on Patreon
I anticipate that if sync is transitioned to syncing content by default,
people will want a short option. And in repositories where
annex.synccontent = true, they already would. And pull and push sync
content by default, so a short option is useful with them too.
Mnemonic: -g makes only git data be synced
Also, -a makes only annex data be synced.
Would have preferred -c, which would complement -C, but it
was already taken to set git configs.
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Split out two new commands, git-annex pull and git-annex push. Those plus a
git commit are equivilant to git-annex sync.
In a sense, git-annex sync conflates 3 things, and it would have been
better to have push and pull from the beginning and not sync. Although
note that git-annex sync --content is faster than a pull followed by a
push, because it only has to walk the tree once, look at preferred
content once, etc. So there is some value in git-annex sync in speed, as
well as user convenience.
And it would be hard to split out pull and push from sync, as far as the
implementaton goes. The implementation inside sync was easy, just adjust
SyncOptions so it does the right thing.
Note that the new commands default to syncing content, unless
annex.synccontent is explicitly set to false. I'd like sync to also do
that, but that's a hard transition to make. As a start to that
transition, I added a note to git-annex-sync.mdwn that it may start to
do so in a future version of git-annex. But a real transition would
necessarily involve displaying warnings when sync is used without
--content, and time.
Sponsored-by: Kevin Mueller on Patreon