Hey,
I've found that git annex works great as a way to publish websites to a web server. I can edit my website on my computer, git annex sync my working directory to the VPS, and then git annex get files-I-want-to-publish. This works great. I can maintain my normal working directory structure on the VPS and I don't have to worry about people seeing files I DIDN'T want to publish, since the dead symlinks just show up as 404s.
There's one small problem.
Say:
1) I've already published a file using git annex get file-to-update
2) I update that file on my computer
3) I do git annex sync
4) I do git annex get file-to-update
Between steps 3 and 4, file-to-update goes from being an accessible web resource to being a dead symlink. It's not really a problem for me, as hardly anyone visits my site. But it would be nice if I could make sync leave the old symlink to the old file until I geted the new one.
Is this possible?
PS: For those who might follow in my footsteps, remember that you probably don't want people reading the contents of your .git dir, so make a re-write rule for this!
Timothy
I'd recommend that you just copy your files to the repository to publish them before running git-annex sync.
Alternatively, unless your web pages are very large, you can just check them into git directly, still use git-annex sync if you want (and still using git-annex for large files), and avoid the complication of being able to have files that are listed in the repository but whose content is not present.