I'm trying git-annex for the first time and having some issues.
I have a WD MyBook 2TB Cloud Drive and using OSX Sierra.
I want to create an Annex on one the NAS smb shares and then a Amazon Cloud Drive replica for offsite backup.
When I run git annex init from the mounted share in OSX it fails with the below:
git-annex init
init
Detected a filesystem without POSIX fcntl lock support.
Enabling annex.pidlock.
Detected a filesystem without fifo support.
Disabling ssh connection caching.
Detected a crippled filesystem.
Disabling core.symlinks.
Enabling direct mode.
A300 second timeout exceeded while waiting for pid lock file .git/annex/pidlock
Below are the results of git-annex version
git-annex version: 6.20170101
build flags: Assistant Webapp Pairing Testsuite S3(multipartupload)(storageclasses) WebDAV FsEvents ConcurrentOutput TorrentParser MagicMime Feeds Quvi
key/value backends: SHA256E SHA256 SHA512E SHA512 SHA224E SHA224 SHA384E SHA384 SHA3_256E SHA3_256 SHA3_512E SHA3_512 SHA3_224E SHA3_224 SHA3_384E SHA3_384 SKEIN256E SKEIN256 SKEIN512E SKEIN512 SHA1E SHA1 MD5E MD5 WORM URL
remote types: git gcrypt p2p S3 bup directory rsync web bittorrent webdav tahoe glacier ddar hook external
local repository version: 5
supported repository versions: 3 5 6
upgrade supported from repository versions: 0 1 2 3 4 5
operating system: darwin x86_64
Is it possible to have an annex on a SMB share?
git-annex needs flock locking to be supported by the filesystem it's used on. There's a workaround using pid locks, but that is apparently not working on OSX in your case. I've only tested it on Linux.
I tried reproducing this on OSX by enabling annex.pidlock before using git-annex. But it worked ok.
So, I suspect there may be a problem with the network filesystem's handling of the pidlock file. One likely problem is if it doesn't support hard links, since the pidlock file is hard linked into place.
You can check if it supports hard links by running this on the drive where you had the problem:
I was able to reproduce the problem with a FAT filesystem mounted on Linux, if I manually enabled annex.pidlock before git-annex init. Hard linking does not work on FAT, so that matches my earlier guess.
I've committed a fix for this, so try again with a recent autobuild of git-annex and it will probably fix your problem.
The fix a couple of months ago appears to allow
git annex initto complete on a SMB file share, which is great. But FTR there are currently issues with file transfers (link is to bug report about failing to get transfer lock), so use with a NAS is still "work in progress".Ewen