Hi Joey, I recently tried cloning a music annex to a microSD card to play on rockbox (FAT only) with my Sansa Clip, but 'git clone' stops the first time it runs into something with a special character in a file or directory, like a colon in an album title. After this happens, there doesn't seem to be a way to get a full annex file/directory listing for the annex; it only has up to where git failed since FAT can't handle the name. Is it possible for git-annex to replace special characters in directory/filenames with a space or underscore if it's on a crippled filesystem? Also, would it be possible to then clone from that annex to a non-crippled FS, preserving the original filenames with special characters? I've been meaning to ask about this for a while, so I'm a teeny bit fuzzy on the specifics...if you want, I'll reproduce the problem and cough up some more details.
PS: I love git-annex!
I think this is a general git question, not specific to git-annex. At the point in time that you run
git cloneon the FAT filesystem, git-annex is not running at all.You could ask the git community about this. I know that git already has a core.precomposeunicode setting that is used to work around a somewhat similar problem on Mac OS.
What git-annex does let you do is set up a ?directory special remote on the FAT filesystem. This way, there is no git repository there, and the filenames stored in git are not used at all on FAT. If your media player looks at mp3 metadata to get song titles, etc and doesn't care about the filenames at all, this would be a good option.