[[!comment format=mdwn
 username="joey"
 subject="""comment 5"""
 date="2022-09-15T16:27:54Z"
 content="""
Ah, oops..  I was thinking about BTRFS..

However, getting back to the original motivation of jgoerzen to
request this, it seems to come down to making a hard link being seen as
"mucking with the source data". That seems like a very weak reason to make
such a very large change to git-annex, that would only be safe in a
small and poorly defined set of circumstances.

And it would be a large change, because currently git-annex can broadly
assume that any time a .git/annex/objects/ file exists, the content
is present in the repository. Every place that makes that assumption
would need to instead check if any of the known work tree files that use
the object are populated with the content (or at least are not annex
pointer files).

(jgoerzen also mentions timestamps, but git-annex preserves those
when ingesting files. Of course timestamp data is not recorded in the git
repository unless you use some other tool to do so.)
"""]]
