Comment by avar

I use it, and love it.

But it's not intended for or good at (without forcing a square peg into a round hole) the sort of thing LFS and promisors are for, which is a public project with binary assets.

git-annex is really for (and shines at) a private backup solution where you'd like to have N copies of some data around on various storage devices, track the history of each copy, ensure that you have at least N copies etc.

Each repository gets a UUID, and each tracked file has a SHA-256 hash. There's a branch which has a timestamp and repo UUID to SHA-256 mapping, if you have 10 repos that file will have (at least) 10 entries.

You can "trust" different repositories to different degrees, e.g. if you're storing a file on both some RAID'd storage server, or an old portable HD you're keeping in a desk drawer.

This really doesn't scale for a public project. E.g. I have a repository that I back up my photos and videos in, that repository has ~700 commits, and ~6000 commits to the metadata "git-annex" branch, pretty close to a 1:10 ratio.

There's an exhaustive history of every file movement that's ever occurred on the 10 storage devices I've ever used for that repository. Now imagine doing all that on a project used by more than one person.

All other solutions to tracking large files along with a git repository forgo all this complexity in favor of basically saying "just get the rest where you cloned me from, they'll have it!".