User question on Info message "remote origin not usable by git-annex"

[adswa]

For posterity and others with similar questions, I'm recording a question a user send privately, and my answer to it:

Hey Adina!
we have currently this git-annex problem with datalad. it kinda does not work:

(dlad) binwan@wolga:/data/p_02378 > 
(dlad) binwan@wolga:/data/p_02378 > datalad clone https://github.com/datalad-datasets/hcp-structural-preprocessed.git HCP1200
[INFO   ] Scanning for unlocked files (this may take some time)                                                                                  
[INFO   ] Remote origin not usable by git-annex; setting annex-ignore                                                                            
[INFO   ] Configured RIA store not found at ria+file:///ds/hcp/srv 
install(ok): /data/p_02378/HCP1200 (dataset)

Answer

Are you sure that it doesn't work?
Could you check that HCP1200 is present and looks like you expect it to look like? :) If you are only referring to the [INFO ] messages, they are fine. What they say is the following:
"Remote origin not usable by git-annex; setting annex-ignore" -> The dataset is cloned from GitHub. The "remote origin" is thus the GitHub repository. Github does not support to have an annex in repositories to store the annexed data of the dataset. Git-annex realizes this, and informs you that it will ignore this remote therefore, and, for example, will not try to retrieve data from it. You will receive this message with everything that you clone from GitHub
"Configured RIA store not found at ria+file:///ds/hcp/srv " -> The data of each HCP (subset) dataset is always drawn from a RIA store in /ds/hcp/srv on our dataserver. When I create these datasets, I do it on this server. Therefore, the first place datalad looks for the RIA store is a local path. Because you're not on the same machine, the path does not exist for you and DataLad can't find it there. Internally, DataLad will then look for the RIA store elsewhere (by first trying other protocols), and eventually finds it at store.datalad.org. As the first attempt fails, DataLad let's you know about it.

All of these messages are log messages. Most programs output those, and there are different levels of logging. "Info" is a level that informs about noteworthy stuff that is not worthy or a warning or an error. If you don't want to get those "Info" messages anymore, you can configure logging to a more severe level. This command would set the log level to "warning" and only display information when DataLad wants to warn you:

git config --global datalad.log.level warning

There is more information on logging in the DataLad Handbook: http://handbook.datalad.org/en/latest/basics/101-135-help.html#logging