[git-annex](https://git-annex.branchable.com/) is a more complicated cousin to
git-lfs, storing large files in an optional-download side content. Unlike lfs,
it allows mixing and matching storage remotes, so the content remote(s) doesn't
need to be on the same server as the git remote, making it feasible to scatter
a collection across cloud storage, old harddrives, or anywhere else storage can
be scavenged. Since this can get complicated, fast, it has a content-tracking
database (`git annex whereis`) to help find everything later.
The use-case we imagine for including it in Gitea is just the simple case, where
we're primarily emulating git-lfs: each repo has its large content at the same URL.
Our motivation is so we can self-host https://www.datalad.org/ datasets, which
currently are only hostable by fragilely scrounging together cloud storage --
and having to manage all the credentials associated with all the pieces -- or at
https://openneuro.org which is fragile in its own ways.
Supporting git-annex also allows multiple Gitea instance to be annex remotes for
each other, mirroring the content or otherwise collaborating the split up the
hosting costs.
Enabling
--------
TODO
HTTP
----
TODO
Permission Checking
-------------------
This tweaks the API in routers/private/serv.go to expose the calling user's
computed permission, instead of just returning HTTP 403.
This doesn't fit in super well. It's the opposite from how the git-lfs support is
done, where there's a complete list of possible subcommands and their matching
permission levels, and then the API compares the requested with the actual level
and returns HTTP 403 if the check fails.
But it's necessary. The main git-annex verbs, 'git-annex-shell configlist' and
'git-annex-shell p2pstdio' are both either read-only or read-write operations,
depending on the state on disk on either end of the connection and what the user
asked it to ask for, with no way to know before git-annex examines the situation.
So tell the level via GIT_ANNEX_READONLY and trust it to handle itself.
In the older Gogs version, the permission was directly read in cmd/serv.go:
```
mode, err = db.UserAccessMode(user.ID, repo)
```
- 966e925cf3/internal/cmd/serv.go (L334)
but in Gitea permission enforcement has been centralized in the API layer.
(perhaps so the cmd layer can avoid making direct DB connections?)
Deletion
--------
git-annex has this "lockdown" feature where it tries
really quite very hard to prevent you deleting its
data, to the point that even an rm -rf won't do it:
each file in annex/objects/ is nested inside a
folder with read-only permissions.
The recommended workaround is to run chmod -R +w when
you're sure you actually want to delete a repo. See
https://git-annex.branchable.com/internals/lockdown
So we edit util.RemoveAll() to do just that, so now
it's `chmod -R +w && rm -rf` instead of just `rm -rf`.
cebfc9cb47