[[!comment format=mdwn
 username="joey"
 subject="""comment 7"""
 date="2017-01-30T17:54:47Z"
 content="""
Hmm, this is a rather old forum thread to be reactivating, maybe a new
thread more about your specific use case, Thomas?

Your master repository idea seems like a good one. If the master
repository is cloned with `git clone --shared` then that clone will
hard link files between it and the master repository (assuming
a git-annex rather newer than the start date of this forum thread!), 
so multiple repositories will only have one copy of the file. 
Of course, since it uses hard links, master and clone need to
be on the same drive.

There are probably ways to improve git-annex to handle this kind of use
case better. Maybe `git clone --shared` across filesystems should
use symlinks rather than hard links or something like that.
That might take some time to design and implement (it changes a core
invariant of git-annex, that .git/annex/objects/ contains files, not
symlinks).

Happy to discuss other options..
"""]]
