Only one bug fix today, but it was a doozie. It seems that gpg2 has an incompatibility with the gpg 1.x that git-annex was written for, that causes large numbers of excess passphrase prompts, when it's supposed to be using a remote's symmetric encryption key. Adding the --batch parameter fixed this.

I also put together a page listing related software to git-annex.

I've also updated direct mode's documentation, about when it's safe to use direct mode. The intuition I've developed about direct mode is that if you don't need full versioning of files (with the ability to get back old versions), direct mode is fine and safe to use. If you want full versioning, it's best to not use direct mode. Or a reasonable compromise is to git annex untrust the direct mode repository and set up a backup remote. With this compromise, only if you edit a file twice in a row might the old version get lost before it can be backed up.

Of course, it would be possible to make direct mode fully version preserving, but it'd have to back up every file in the repository locally to do so. Going back to two local copies of every file, which is part of git that git-annex happily avoids. Hmm, it might be possible to only back up a file locally until it reaches the backup remote..