is it possible for having import/export (pull/push) funciontality for the rsync special remote? similar to how the adb special remote handles importing and exporting treeishes? an example use case is that i have a pinePhone which i push files (music, podcasts, pdfs) to using the rsync special remote so it can be done over my wifi network, but it would be cool to also be able to import either any picutres i take, or to import any documents that I pull from the internet and then store on the pinePhone back into my annex.
some reasons that I do not just make a another full annex repo on the pinePhone really comes down computation resource limitations of the pinephone. and I have a very large git annex (150,000+ keys) which can make the git repo fairly large.
exporttree is already supported by both. importtree is unlikely to be supported. It's difficult to support this without opening up a very real possibility of data loss. If you're importing and exporting to the same remote, what happens when there's a conflict? Eg, whatever else is writing files to the remote writes to a file, but you locally modify the same file, and export a tree, without importing the new version first. That would overwrite the modified file on the remote, losing data.
All the special remotes that support exporttree+importtree are able to avoid losing data in this scenario. (At least as well as git is able to, there are similar races when git updates a working tree at the same time you modify a file in the working tree, but the timing of it makes it very unlikely, so much that noone seems to worry about it). See also import tree from rsync special remote
I have not felt comfortable giving users a loaded gun in this case. So only exporttree is supported, because the user doesn't expect something else to be writing to files on that remote, or if they do, they don't have any reason to expect git-annex to deal with it well.
Anyway, it seems to me it should be possible to install git-annex on your pinephone and connect the repos using ssh.