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.
git-annex allows managing files with git, without checking the file
contents into git. While that may seem paradoxical, it is useful when
dealing with files larger than git can currently easily handle, whether due
to limitations in memory, checksumming time, or disk space.
For documentation, see doc/ or <https://git-annex.branchable.com/>
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