Started laying the groundwork for desymlink's direct mode. I got rather far!

A git repo can be configured with annex.direct and all actions that transfer objects to it will replace the symlinks with regular files. Removing objects also works (and puts back a broken symlink), as does checking if an object is present, which even detects if a file has been modified.

So far, this works best when such a direct mode repository is used as a git remote of another repository. It is also possible to run a few git-annex commands, like "get" in a direct mode repository, though others, like "drop" won't work because they rely on the symlink to map back to the key.

Direct mode relies on map files existing for each key in the repository, that tell what file(s) use it. It also relies on cache files, that contain the last known mtime, size, and inode of the file. So far, I've been setting these files up by hand.

The main thing that's missing is support for transferring objects from direct mode repositories. There's no single place I can modify to support that (like I could for the stuff mentioned above), and also it's difficult to do safely, since files could be modified at any time.

So it'll need to quarantine files, to prevent a modified version from getting sent out. I could either do this by copying the file, or by temporarily git annex locking it. Unsure which choice would be less annoying..

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Also did some investigation with Jimmy of the OSX app git-config hang. Seems to be some kind of imcompatability between the 10.7 autobuilder and 10.8. Next step is probably to try to build on 10.8. Might also be worth trying http://macdylibbundler.sourceforge.net/, although my own scripts do more or less the same thing to build the app.