[theamk]

Last time we used git-annex was a few years ago, and it was too decentralized: the "sync" command that we used to download the remote content would also upload the information about current state.

This means there are were no read-only operations: you just want some files.. and that throwaway clone and CI machine would get recorded into the global repo state. If you are not careful, and will be propagated forever and would appear in the various reports.

[rakoo]

That's the whole premise of git-annex: not distributing content but distributing what machine has the content. If you just want to get the content you have to hack git-annex, probably by reading the manifest, to get the url and download content in a third party process