Please describe the problem.

It seems that the synced/git-annex branch (which I am a little confused about in the first place), doesn't get synced automatically by the assistant.

I was expecting the assistant to regularly do the equivalent of git annex sync. However, after a client pushed changes to the git-annex branch, I had to manually do a git annex sync for the changes of the synced/git-annex branch to be merged down into the local git-annex.

What steps will reproduce the problem?

I have 3 machines in this setup (to simplify: there are more, but those are sufficient). Let's call them foo, bar and quux. foo and quuex are connected to bar through password-less SSH connexions.

foo commits a file to git-annex. the assistant syncs that to bar in the synced/git-annex branch.

quux syncs with bar, and seems to ignore the synced/git-annex branch.

git-annex sync on quux syncs the synced/git-annex branch into the local git-annex, working around the issue.

What version of git-annex are you using? On what operating system?

foo is 5.20150610+gitg608172f-1~ndall+1 on Debian 7.8 (wheezy).

bar and quux are 5.20150409+git126-ga29f683-1~ndall+1 and 5.20150610+gitg608172f-1~ndall+1 (respectively) on Ubuntu 12.04 (precise) .

Please provide any additional information below.

I guess a more general question is how and how often do those branches get merged by the assistant... it's still unclear to me how this works.

$ sudo -u www-data -H git annex sync
(merging origin/synced/git-annex into git-annex...)
(recording state in git...)
commit  ok
pull origin
Auto packing the repository in background for optimum performance.
See "git help gc" for manual housekeeping.

Already up-to-date.
ok
push origin
Counting objects: 373637, done.
# End of transcript or log.

This was started at 20:23 UTC. Note that the sync had run previously under the assistant:

[2015-07-22 20:09:06 UTC] RemoteControl: Syncing with origin

Available, as usual, for further debugging. :) -- anarcat