Please describe the problem.
It seems that the synced/git-annex branch (which I am a little confused about in the first place), doesn't get synced automatically by the assistant.
I was expecting the assistant to regularly do the equivalent of git annex sync. However, after a client pushed changes to the git-annex branch, I had to manually do a git annex sync for the changes of the synced/git-annex branch to be merged down into the local git-annex.
What steps will reproduce the problem?
I have 3 machines in this setup (to simplify: there are more, but those are sufficient). Let's call them foo, bar and quux. foo and quuex are connected to bar through password-less SSH connexions.
foo commits a file to git-annex. the assistant syncs that to bar in the synced/git-annex branch.
quux syncs with bar, and seems to ignore the synced/git-annex branch.
git-annex sync on quux syncs the synced/git-annex branch into the local git-annex, working around the issue.
What version of git-annex are you using? On what operating system?
foo is 5.20150610+gitg608172f-1~ndall+1 on Debian 7.8 (wheezy).
bar and quux are 5.20150409+git126-ga29f683-1~ndall+1 and 5.20150610+gitg608172f-1~ndall+1 (respectively) on Ubuntu 12.04 (precise) .
Please provide any additional information below.
I guess a more general question is how and how often do those branches get merged by the assistant... it's still unclear to me how this works.
$ sudo -u www-data -H git annex sync
(merging origin/synced/git-annex into git-annex...)
(recording state in git...)
commit ok
pull origin
Auto packing the repository in background for optimum performance.
See "git help gc" for manual housekeeping.
Already up-to-date.
ok
push origin
Counting objects: 373637, done.
# End of transcript or log.
This was started at 20:23 UTC. Note that the sync had run previously under the assistant:
[2015-07-22 20:09:06 UTC] RemoteControl: Syncing with origin
Available, as usual, for further debugging. 
-- anarcat
The assistant merges the synced/git-annex branch whenever it detects (via inotify) that a change has been made to that git ref.
I can't reproduce a problem from the information you've given. With
foo -> bar <- quux, and assistants running on foo and quux, any file written to foo more or less immediately syncs to quux, and the git-annex branch is merged.Even when I stop the assistant running on foo, and manually run
git push bar git-annex:synced/git-annex, quux immediately notices that bar has received that synced/git-annex, and fetches and merges it into its own git-annex branch.Note that I'm assuming that bar is a remote of both foo and of quux. That seems like a reasonable reading of what you described, and is a reasonable configuration, but perhaps you were trying to describe some other configuration.
In mesh configurations you seem to instead describe a chain of remotes, where bar is a remote of foo, and quux is a remote of bar:
foo -> bar -> quux. In this configuration, running the assistant on foo and quux, but not on bar, would not result in changes made on quux ever getting to foo, because quux has no way to push objects to bar. So, I don't think that's the configuration you meant either. But lack of clarity in bug report makes it hard to know.