Finished this feature, and I'm liking it quite a lot! Though I had to put off ?support public versioned S3 access until some other time as I'm all out of time and energy.

The storage of S3 version IDs got rethought -- I was not comfortable with using per-remote state in the git-annex branch which would have caused problems if dropping from these remotes later gets supported.

So, I added per-remote metadata in about 1 hour! It's like git-annex's regular metadata, but scoped so only the remote that owns it can see it. This is perfect for storing things like S3 version IDs. It probably ought to be added to the external special remote interface since it could be used for lots of stuff.

Here's how that looks when S3 version IDs are stored in it:

1535737778.867692782s 31ea6c94-fba3-4952-99b5-285ae192d92a:V +woYHK59DD2VUkJfg527mEBBqtCaPlSXn#myfile

This work was supported by the NSF-funded DataLad project.