Hello all,
With an anonymous checkout, you can commit and push. You have to add the correct URL to push to: git push <url>, but you can still push. This is a lot easier than checking out your Cactus tree again in non-anonymous mode.
Also a number of users and maintainers may not be able to check out the whole tree non-anonymously since they don't have write permissions to all of the git/hg repositories (only Carpet is affected I think). Currently that does not seem to include me though :-)
There was at one point a discussion about making "-a" in GetComponents the default (assuming there are more users with read only access than developers with read/write access) at http://lists.einsteintoolkit.org/pipermail/users/2011-December/001687.html
As far as I can see no clear decision whether to make "-a" the default was reached. At that time the feeling seems to have been that the interactive questioning by GetComponents was sufficient (but that it was broken at that time).
Yours, Roland