Please describe the problem.

I have set up a repository with assistant. Then, within it, I ran:

git annex initremote source type=directory directory=... importtree=yes encryption=none
git annex enableremote source type=directory directory=...
git config remote.source.annex-readonly true
git config remote.source.annex-tracking-branch main:data
git annex import main:data --from source

At this point, git annex sync will (usually) sync this.

What steps will reproduce the problem?

There are two problems.

1. The assistant will never sync this, no matter what I do. I can request a manual sync of either the repo or the remote, and neither does anything.
2. It appears that the assistant is creating a locking race with the CLI. For instance, I got fatal: Unable to create '.git/index.lock': .git/index.lock: openFd: already exists (File exists) with one run of git annex sync, but the run of it before and after worked fine.

When there isn't a race with git annex sync, it behaves as desired.

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

8.20210223-2 on Debian bullseye.

Please provide any additional information below.

I will probably disable assistant

Have you had any luck using git-annex before? (Sometimes we get tired of reading bug reports all day and a lil' positive end note does wonders)

I'm pretty excited about using this approach to help archive some photos and such!