Why are there different versions for 10.7, 10.8, 10.9 anyway? Is it not possible to produce an executable compatible with all these? I mean, it's the same architecture and executable format, not? I guess there has to be a reason, explanations are welcome :-)

Britt's comment is spot on, but git-annex tries pretty hard to work with lots of older versions of haskell libraries, as well as the latest and greatest. So it should be ok to install haskell libraries with apt-get and use them to build git-annex, as the (revised) instructions above show.

What tends not to work so well is use apt-get to install older versions of haskell libraries and then cabal install on top to add newer stuff. Gets complicated and I'd recommend not going there. The instructions above show using either apt-get or cabal to install the haskell libraries, but not both.

The c2hs mentioned in some of the above comments is not needed any longer; ghc 7.6.3 and newer come with a hsc2hs command that is used.

@azul - the problem with installing dependencies from apt-get is that the Ubuntu haskell packages are rather old. It shouldn't be this way (and it has gotten a LOT better - I suggest installing the newest version of the Haskell Platform that you can), but often cabal will complain about a package it is unable to install because it failed on the install of that package's dependencies. You should try to cabal install $FAILED_DEPENDENCY (not an actual env variable), and you will often get more informative error messages - some packages require non-haskell dependencies (take gtk3, for instance) which cabal doesn't know how to handle at this point, because that would require some cross platform foo (cabal install runs on Windows and OSX, which don't have native package managers at all).

@Paul - It looks like you ran into a bug, because http-client no longer depends on network>=2.6, it now can take network 2.4 - 2.6 or 2.6 or greater. If you try again it should work.

Please don't be put off by haskell because of things like this - git annex is a very large and complicated project, and developing on large projects such as this pretty much require you to have pretty recent versions of all haskell packages. I really suggest you take a look at this book http://learnyouahaskell.com/introduction. Haskell is a beautiful language and it doesn't have to be esoteric, academic, or difficult at all. It's obvious since you are attempting to build this from source that you are either interested in haskell or you are only interested in the development of git-annex. Either way, it would behoove you to read that book. It is short, full of great examples, and it even has pleasant illustrations. It may look like a children's book, but by the end of it you will know how to use all of the major monads (you may not know what a monad is, but that isn't really that important anyway - you just need to know how they are used).

Some documentation that would be nice having added in the appropriate places:

• Exactly how is the index file being used? Is this just a copy of the git index file that we would get when checking out the git-annex branch? Why is the file kept around? Which sort of operations are done on the index, e.g. when doing git annex add?

• For all time-stamped data-structures: Exactly which significance does the time-stamp have? E.g., for uuid.log, is this the date the name was changed?

I don't know if this is what Jack wanted, but you can upload your files to S3 and let them be accessible through a public URL.

First, go to (or create) the bucket you will use at S3 and add a public get policy to it:

   {
        "Version": "2008-10-17",
        "Statement": [
            {
                "Sid": "AllowPublicRead",
                "Effect": "Allow",
                "Principal": {
                    "AWS": "*"
                },
                "Action": "s3:GetObject",
                "Resource": "arn:aws:s3:::BUCKETNAME/*"
            }
        ]
    }

Then set up your special remote with the options encryption=none, bucket='BUCKETNAME' chunk=0 (and any others you want).

Your files will be accessible through http://BUCKETNAME.s3-website-LOCATION.amazonaws.com/KEY where location is the one specified through the options datacenter and KEY is the SHA-SOMETHING hash of the file, created by git annex and accessible if you run git annex lookupkey FILEPATH.

This way you can share a link to each file you have at your S3 remote.

Hi!

I've made a fresh install of Gitolite 3.6.1 and got this error when trying to sync :

FATAL: bad git-annex-shell command: git-annex-shell 'configlist' '/nicolas.git' at /home/git/bin/commands/git-annex-shell line 25, line 1.

Jack, if you don't want to use encryption you can use encryption=none as documented here.

I'm not sure exactly what you're trying to do, but please note that you files won't be easily available on S3: they will be named as git-annex keys, with long and unreadable names such as "SHA256E-s6311--c7533fdd259d872793b7298cbb56a1912e80c52a845661b0b9ff391c65ee2abc.html" instead of "index.html".

Because megaannex apparently isn't working nowadays I have created a compatible program in Go. I think it should handle everything except REMOVE right now.

You can find it on github: https://github.com/dxtr/megaannex-go

Once use case for GIT with Amazon S3 is to maintain a web site on S3 you can easily update from a local machine. In that case you would not want to encrypt. Is encryption optional? This isn't clear from the instructions.