I've been thinking a bit more about annex.dotfiles in the context of this forum post. It seems to me that annexed dotfiles can jump to git in a way that's surprising and worth raising as a possible bug.

Say that I have repo with annex.dotfiles=true in the .git/config, and I add some dotfiles to the annex. Then, someone clones that repo and goes into an adjusted state (either by running git annex adjust --unlock or by being on a crippled file system). In that clone, calling annex get on any of the annexed dotfiles will lead to those files being added to the index as regular files. (Demo included below.)

The above issue could be resolved by the user storing annex.dotfiles=true in git-annex:config.log, but perhaps it'd be feasible for git-annex to guard against already annexed dotfiles migrating to git?

Thanks in advance.

git annex version | head -1

cd "$(mktemp -d --tmpdir gx-XXXXXXX)"
git init a
(
    cd a
    git annex init a
    git config annex.dotfiles true
    mkdir .reallybig
    echo "a" >.reallybig/foo
    git annex add .reallybig/foo
    git commit -m"add foo"
)

git clone a b
(
    cd b
    git annex init b
    git annex adjust --unlock
    git annex get .reallybig
    git status
    git diff --cached
)

git-annex version: 8.20200226
[...]
On branch adjusted/master(unlocked)
Changes to be committed:
        modified:   .reallybig/foo

diff --git a/.reallybig/foo b/.reallybig/foo
index 3de500c..7898192 100644
--- a/.reallybig/foo
+++ b/.reallybig/foo
@@ -1 +1 @@
-/annex/objects/SHA256E-s2--87428fc522803d31065e7bce3cf03fe475096631e5e07bbd7a0fde60c4cf25c7
+a

fixed --Joey