I hear that people want the git-annex assistant to be easy to install without messing about building it from source..

on OSX

So Jimmy and I have been working all week on making an easily installed OSX app of the assistant. This is a .dmz file that bundles all the dependencies (git, etc) in, so it can be installed with one click.

It seems to basically work. You can get it here.

Unfortunatly, the ?pasting into annex on OSX bug resurfaced while testing this.. So I can't really recommend using it on real data yet.

Still, any testing you can do is gonna be really helpful. I'm squashing OSX bugs right and left.

on Linux

First of all, the git-annex assistant is now available in Debian unstable, and in Arch Linux's AUR. Proper packages.

For all the other Linux distributions, I have a workaround. It's a big hack, but it seems to work.. at least on Debian stable.

I've just put up a linux standalone tarball, which has no library dependencies apart from glibc, and doesn't even need git to be installed on your system.

on FreeBSD

The FreeBSD port has been updated to include the git-annex assistant too..