It would be nice if git-annex could be used in bare git repos. However, that is not currently supported. Problems include:

  • git-annex often does not read a git repo's config before touching it, so it doesn't know if the repo is bare or not (reading the config when operating on ssh repos would be a pain and SLOW; I had some of that code in as of 1aa19422ac8748eeff219ac4f46df166dae783c5, but ripped it all out)
  • .. which results in creating .git/annex in a bare repo, which mightily confuses git (so it will complain that the bare repo is not a git repo at all!)
  • .git-annex/ needs to have state recorded to it and committed, and that is not possible with a bare repo. (If branching were done, that might be fixed.)