Sparkleshare and dvcs-autosync are tools to automatically commit your changes to git and keep them in sync with other repositories. Unlike git-annex, they don't store the file content on the side, but directly in the git repository. Great for small files, less good for big files.

Here's how to use the git-annex assistant to do the same thing, but even better!


Let's suppose you're developing a video game, written in C. You have source code, and some large game assets. You want to ensure the source code is stored in git -- that's what git's for! And you want to store the game assets in the git annex -- to avod bloating your git repos with possibly enormous files, but still version control them.

All you need to do is configure git-annex to treat your C files as small files. And treat any file larger than, say, 100kb as a large file that is stored in the annex.

git config annex.largefiles "largerthan=100kb and not (include=*.c or include=*.h)"

For more details about this configuration, see largefiles.


Now if you run git annex add, it will only add the large files to the annex; small files will be stored in git.

Or, run git annex assistant. It will automatically add the large files to the annex, and store the small files in git. It'll notice every time you modify a file, and immediately commit it, too. And sync it out to other repositories you configure using git annex webapp.


It's also possible to disable the use of the annex entirely, and just have the assistant always put every file into git, no matter its size:

git config annex.largefiles "exclude=*"