git-annex in a separate branch

[kousu]

• is incompatible with Github's pull request UI, because that assumes (fairly!) that all the changes for a branch are confined to one branch
• is easy to forget to upload add site data ucdavis spine-generic/data-multi-subject#77 (comment)
• is merged out-of-order; different repos end up with different histories in their git-annex branches as they sync with each other in different orders.

[kousu]

Maybe we should have everyone

git config --global remote.origin.annex-speculate-present true
git config --global remote.amazon.annex-speculate-present true
git config --global annex.alwayscommit false # don't write to `git-annex`

That should reduce our need for the git-annex branch.

We do need it when we add new remotes. But that's pretty rare, that only happens with our public datasets and we (well, probably, I) can make sure to handle uploading git-annex in that case.

In fact, if we also avoid git annex sync, we'll never change the git-annex branch at all, I think.

[kousu]

Bitten by this today in spine-generic/data-multi-subject#108, where a friend tried to work with a Github Fork, which does not sync the git-annex branch the way git annex thinks it should.

In this case, they weren't trying to contribute, they just wanted to download. But they'd forked a while ago, and so their git-annex branch was out of date, causing failures.