On Tuesday, 18 August 2015 17:49:15 CEST, jeremy rosen wrote: > isn't that what the local-copy feature is for ?
The local-copy feature was added after I was already a git-annex user for quite some time, IIRC. It also doesn't provide all features which I value the git-annex for. The way git-annex works is by storing special symlinks into git. These symlinks in general point to a storage location which is managed by git-annex, they include a checksum hash of the file's content, and the symlinks themselves are subject to usual git's rules for storage. That way, I can simply put the XMP files managed by Darktable into the same git repo, and I can sleep well knowing that all of my changes and all of the history is safely stored in git. That's a huge bonus for me because I occasionaly touch this computer when I'm not 100% sober. I can rely on git's history and its various tools for managing conflicts if I ever touch the XMPs from another location and forget to sync. There's no manual synchronization of the XMPs to speak of, unlike what the local-copy's documentation talks about. My git-annex is also configured to keep N copies of my RAWs at various independent disks, some of them off-line, others off-site, possibly at various locations. I can ask git-annex to perform periodic full content validation of theese drives, catching silent data corruption in the process (this is a real problem with today's disk sizes). I can conveniently ask for the best storage location to transfer the data from. Heck, I could use git-annex' support for special remotes such as Amazon S3 for having one more off-site backup besides my existing SSH-based setup if I was into that cloud thingy. This is a *huge* task, and because it has a lot to do with data integrity, it must better be done by something which is battle-tested and which has a good track record of reliability. With all due respect to the wide Darktable community, I do not think that we should be in the business of providing storage management software because long-term data storage is orthogonal to RAW development and photo management, in my opinion. That's why DT's local-copy is not enough for me. However, I would love to extend this local-copy thing to call out to git-annex' commands which make files available/unavailable locally. That should of course be an optional feature. TL;DR: git-annex is a superset of DT's local-copy. They should be made to play well with each other, IMHO. Cheers, Jan -- Trojitá, a fast Qt IMAP e-mail client -- http://trojita.flaska.net/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Darktable-users mailing list Darktable-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/darktable-users
