I have some git repositories I don't edit often that I'd like to back up. I'd like to add these to my git annex, so I don't have to resort to a time-consuming hack (such as setting up a proper submodule, or bundling the repositories).

But when I try to add a .git directory to git annex, I get a bunch of errors of the form

git-annex: user error (xargs ["-0","git","--git-dir=/tmp/tmp.LhGN3nT9uM/annex/.git","--work-tree=/tmp/tmp.LhGN3nT9uM/annex","add","--"] exited 123)
failed
git-annex: add: 1 failed
add repo/.git/hooks/pre-push.sample ok
(Recording state in git...)
error: Invalid path 'repo/.git/hooks/pre-push.sample'
error: unable to add repo/.git/hooks/pre-push.sample to index
fatal: adding files failed

STR:

$ mkdir annex
$ cd annex
annex$ git init
annex$ git annex init
annex$ cd ..

$ mkdir repo
$ cd repo
repo$ git init
repo$ cd ..

$ mv repo annex
$ cd annex
annex$ find repo | xargs -n1 git annex add
# Lots of errors of the form above.

You can't simply do git annex add repo because that will ignore the .git directory. Similarly,git annex add .git (which I'd think really should try to add the contents of the .git directory) ignores everything.

I don't know what this error means. Is there a right way to work around this?

confirmed (but may be out of scope for git-annex) --Joey

closing as out of scope