I have several remotes which are not always accessible. For example they can be on hosts only accessible by LAN or on a portable hard drive which is not plugged in. When running sync these remotes are checked as well, leading to unnecessary error messages and possibly git-annex waiting for a few minutes on each remote for a timeout.
In this situation it would be useful to mark some remotes as offline
(git annex offline <remotename>), so that git-annex would not even attempt
to contact them. Then, I could configure my system to automatically, for example,
mark a portable hard disk remote online when plugging it in, and offline when
unplugging it, and similarly marking remotes offline and online depending on
whether I have an internet connection or a connection to a specific network.
You can already do this:
There's no need to do anything for portable drives that are sometimes mounted and sometimes not -- git-annex will automatically avoid using repositories in directories that do not currently exist.
I thought git-annex also had a way to run a command and use its exit status to control whether a repo was ignored or not, but it seems I never actually implemented that. It might be worth adding, although the command would necessarily run whenever git-annex is transferring data around.
Ah, I didn't read the man page carefully enough. My apologies.
Setting the ignore status based on an exit status would be even better, since this avoids re-writing a new config file for each repository each time I enter or exit my LAN.