There is no suitable git hook to run code when pulling changes that
might need to be merged into the git-annex branch. The post-merge hook
is only run when changes are merged into HEAD, and it's possible,
and indeed likely that many pulls will only have changes in git-annex,
but not in HEAD, and not trigger it.
So, git-annex will have to take care to update the branch before reading
from it, to make sure it has merged in current info from remotes. Happily,
this can be done quite inexpensively, just a git-show-ref to list
branches, and a minimalized git-log to see if there are unmerged changes
on the branches. To further speed up, it will be done only once per
git-annex run, max.
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 <http://git-annex.branchable.com/>