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.
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