[[!comment format=mdwn
 username="joey"
 subject="""re: I wonder if "thin mode" could generalize beyond hardlinks"""
 date="2020-01-29T15:15:06Z"
 content="""
The ideas in that comment won't work, and here's why: 

If git-annex does not maintain a hardlink in .git/annex/objects,
then when you run git checkout and it replaces the working tree file
with some other version, or deletes it, it's deleted the only copy
of the annex object that is stored on your disk. So you lose data.
"""]]