[[!comment format=mdwn
 username="joey"
 subject="""comment 4"""
 date="2020-05-07T15:56:38Z"
 content="""
`git annex get` will only complain about files that are still in the
current branch. If you want to use `--all` though, you will have to mark
such files as dead. git-annex otherwise has no way to differentiate between
the last copy of a file being lost inaverdently and intentionally removed.

Auto-deading files would hide problems.

> even marking it as dead is still tracking the deadness of the file

You can use git-annex forget to prune that information from the git-annex
branch, but it's completely reasonable for a git repository to retain
history by default.

> Leaving aside what the status is called, how about detecting it
> automatically on `dropunused`

Unused files are only unused in the head of branches, not in all the
history of the git repository. Again, git is all about preserving the
history of files.
"""]]
