pushing makes local file into symbolic links?

[marisacasillas]

hello!

i just made my first commit to a GIN dataset following the push instructions here and it turned my local files into symbolic links:

• did i do something wrong? i did datalad save PATH -m "message" and then datalad push
• maybe there's a flag for keeping my local files sync'd—is there?
• whatever the answer is, it'd be great to add a note about it to the instructions page here

i'm also having problems with datalad get right now (i posted an issue on EL1000/Cougar) so maybe it's just me! if so, sorry!

[lucasgautheron]

Hello!

I don't think you did anything wrong: your files were uploaded just fine to GIN (https://gin.g-node.org/EL1000/cougar/src/main/scripts/tt-report)

DataLad is built on git annex, and git annex has two ways to store contents:

1. As normal git files (then they are simply stored in the git repository as normal)
2. As "annexed" files. In that case, git only stores a pointer to the actual contents of the file, which is itself stored into the annex. When you do datalad save, DataLad decides, based on the rules defined in .gitattributes, whether to store each file in the annex or using vanilla git. Apparently the rules for cougar are such that those files were annexed . I have opened an issue about this on DataLad's github. I'll rewrite the .gitattributes file so that nothing in scripts/ gets annexed, not just files at the root of scripts.

Any way: if you need to edit annexed files, all you need to do is datalad unlock scripts/tt-report and they will be unlocked (transformed backed from symlinks to actual files). Then you can edit them and datalad save and datalad push your changes when you are done.

[marisacasillas]

got it, thank you!