Landed two behavior changes in the past two days, which I wanted to mention here.

First, special remotes configured with autoenable=yes will be auto-enabed by the automatic git-annex initialization that it does in a clone of a git-annex repo. Before, git annex init had to be run to "auto-enable" them. Probably few people will notice this, unless a special remote somehow takes too long to enable. May later have to add a timeout.

Second, a command like git annex get foo will complain if the specified file or directory is not known to git. Lots of users have gotten confused by why such a command would silently return without doing anything.

Commands like git annex get dir will not complain about files in the directory that are not under git's control, unless none of them are. (Same behavior as eg git commit dir.) Mostly this change affects using wildcards, or just being confused about a file not being checked into git.

Due to the potential to break some workflows, new behavior will only be enabled for now annex.skipunknown is set to false. I plan to make that the default in early 2022. (About a year delay seemed right generally but I added some time due to the pandemic.) So if you prefer the original behavior, you can just set annex.skipunknown true.

At least for now, git-annex will still skip over files that are checked into git but are not annexed files. May make sense to change that too, we'll see if users get confused by that like by the other skipping behavior.