Here's yet another weird use case. I have a ext3 external drive for storing media that i brought to the office. Naturally, all files on the drive are owned by my desktop user (uid = 1000). In the office, my userid is different (say 1001), so git-annex doesn't see the removable drive at all (which is a little confusing). But even if i try to add the repo on the drive as an external repo, it says it can't write to it (which is true).

I would expect it to at least be able to leech the files off of it.

Otherwise, I would welcome advice on how to fix this problem without doing a sudo chown -R every time i plug this drive somewhere ... --anarcat

Workaround: sudo setfacl -R -m u:anarcat:rwx /media/foo/annex

Note: this seems like there was at least one dupe opened about this in ?annex get fails from read-only filesystem.

I concede that this may refer to many different issues, so here's a short inventory of issues with readonly repositories:

  • trying to add an external readonly drive through the webapp: not detected: see show readonly removable drives in the webapp
  • trying to add an external readonly drive through the commandline: fails to sync? - couldn't reproduce locally, i will need to go back to that machine for more tests :(
  • trying to add a ssh readonly remote through the webapp: fails to sync and considers the remote "git-only" (which also fails) - couldn't reproduce locally either - maybe this is related to the upgrade option in ?annex get fails from read-only filesystem
  • trying to add a local readonly remote through the webapp: fails to add, see cannot add local readonly repo through the webapp
  • failing to sync with a readonly remote of a different version: still an issue, see ?annex get fails from read-only filesystem - at least content should be syncable even if the upgrade fails (think of failure conditions such as broken hard drives that are put in readonly mode or ddrescue'd disk images)