Changing Largefile Specification for Imported Trees

If you want files to be large/small after already importing a tree from an importtree enabled remote, well, it appears you can't.

I tried removing the imported branch via git branch -d --remote <tree>/<branch>. While this produces a new clean import commit upon running import again, it does not respect changes to .gitattributes. Instead, git-annex seems to hold onto information about which files were large/small in a given special remote. So, the only way to change what are considered large files and small files is to create a new special remote entirely :/

For most people, this should not be too problematic since the history of imported trees isn't too important, but for some diffs on an external tree may be valuable. Is there any interest in addressing this issue? For a better understanding, here is a MWE to reproduce this:

  1. Create an importtree enabled special remote for a fresh repo without a .gitattributes file (or at least one without annex.largefiles attributes)
  2. Import (e.g. gx import -f tree main) from this tree and note that all files are considered large (e.g. git log --raw tree/main -> git show <hash>)
  3. Modify/create a local .gitattributes file (and add it to the index) that would specify one of the tree files as small (i.e. annex.largefiles does not match)
  4. Attempt new import, or do git branch -d --remote tree/main and perform new import.
  5. Note that all files are still considered large.

Maybe there's another way of fixing this that I don't know about, but as far as I know, from this point you have to delete the special remote and redo the above now with the desired .gitattributes file staged for files in this external tree to be imported as small.

?done

Conclusion: Don't just delete the imported branch, update it with a commit to force small/large the files as desired.