Seems I forgot why I was using debian stable chroots to make the autobuilds: Lots of people still using old glibc version. Had to rebuild the stable chroots that I had upgraded to unstable. Wasted several hours.. I was able to catch up on recent traffic in between.

Was able to reproduce a bug where git annex initremote hung with some encrypted special remotes. Turns out to be a deadlock when it's not built with the threaded GHC runtime. So I've forced that runtime to be used.