Unlocked files with content not present appear as regular files containing
an annex pointer. This is not ideal as the user has no way to know if the
content is present other than file size. Broken symlinks are a better
representation.

# smudge approach

It would be possible to make `git annex smudge --update` write symlinks
for the missing content files. But then git will think they're modified, 
and committing will lock them.

Is it possible at all for the index to be in the state where a file that's
been converted to a symlink is not treated as modified? The index contains
an object type value, which will need to be set to symlink. But if 
the tree for the checked out branch has the object type of regular file,
git diff-index would consider there to be a staged change. So probably
it's not possible. Still, it would be worth playing with the file format to
see if perhaps it can be tricked.

Or such staged (non-)changes could be filtered out by the pre-commit hook.
This is probably possible, but git status, diff, etc would show the
non-present files as modified still.

# adjusted branch approach

Use an adjusted branch, where files with missing content are locked.

Often the users who are affected by this are already using git-annex adjust
--unlock, so using a different adjustment would be a minor change for them.

Such a branch is very conceptually similar to a --hide-missing branch.
And so certianly seems doable. Like a --hide-missing branch, there's an
open question of how to update the branch after get/drop of content.

Needing to manually re-run git-annex adjust, as is done with --hide-missing,
means the user is still going to get surprised when files they open
turn out to have missing content. So for this to really be useful,
the branch needs to automatically get updated.

--[[Joey]]

[[!tag needsthought]]