One problem I keep having when using a direct repo is that in order to get to the previous versions of a file you have to convert that repo to indirect and then checkout previous commits this becomes problematic when the repo in question is large conversion takes a long time and applications gets confused if there are open files from the repo as they go from actual files to symlinks. Is it possible to have a separate annex command that will checkout a previous version of a file to a different directory so we can replace/inspect it.
