Please describe the problem.
Had some datalad command failing at either annex add or commit and tried to reproduce with minimal example but failed, overall: if config is set to use
❯ git config annex.dbdir
/tmp/cache/git-annex
and leading /tmp/cache does not exist then in some (e.g. whatever happens during git pull --ff-only):
❯ git pull --ff-only
...
create mode 100644 cron-20221228/build-windows.yaml-896-ef8b9610-success/test-datalad (release)/8_Install.txt
create mode 100644 cron-20221228/build-windows.yaml-896-ef8b9610-success/test-datalad (release)/9_Configure service.txt
git-annex: /tmp/cache/git-annex: createDirectory: does not exist (No such file or directory)
❯ git annex version
git-annex version: 10.20221003
or could be even more fun:
❯ git pull --ff-only
You are not currently on a branch.
Please specify which branch you want to merge with.
See git-pull(1) for details.
git pull <remote> <branch>
❯ git co master
Previous HEAD position was 3855af5 [tinuous] 20 logs added
Switched to branch 'master'
Your branch is up to date with 'origin/master'.
git-annex: /tmp/cache/git-annex: createDirectory: does not exist (No such file or directory)
❯ echo $?
1
❯ git co master
git-annex: /tmp/cache/git-annex: createDirectory: does not exist (No such file or directory)
error: packet write failed: Broken pipe
error: external filter 'git-annex filter-process' failed
git-annex: /tmp/cache/git-annex: createDirectory: does not exist (No such file or directory)
error: external filter 'git-annex filter-process' failed
git-annex: /tmp/cache/git-annex: createDirectory: does not exist (No such file or directory)
error: packet write failed: Broken pipe
error: external filter 'git-annex filter-process' failed
git-annex: /tmp/cache/git-annex: createDirectory: does not exist (No such file or directory)
error: external filter 'git-annex filter-process' failed
git-annex: /tmp/cache/git-annex: createDirectory: does not exist (No such file or directory)
error: packet write failed: Broken pipe
error: external filter 'git-annex filter-process' failed
git-annex: /tmp/cache/git-annex: createDirectory: does not exist (No such file or directory)
error: packet write failed: Broken pipe
error: external filter 'git-annex filter-process' failed
... pressed Ctrl-C
and if I precreate leading one -- seems to be feeling ok
❯ mkdir /tmp/cache
❯ git co master
Already on 'master'
Your branch is up to date with 'origin/master'.
NB IIRC: originally came up within reproin-ification effort on rolando and its NFS mounted partition.
I took a look at why it does this, and it's because git-annex takes a lot of care to avoid doing things like creating /mnt/repo/.git/ when /mnt is not mounted. To the directory creating code, the parent directory of annex.dbdir is treated as an alternate top-level directory, which it can only create subdirectories of, but not create itself. So the directory creating code would need to become somewhat more complicated to support the possibility of creating parent directories of one but not of the other.
Maybe the prospect of such complexity is coloring my thinking, but it seems like similar concerns about mount points may affect annex.dbdir. After all, the point of it is to provide a path on some other filesystem. When that filesystem is not currently mounted, it would be better for it to error out like this than to create a directory structure inside its mount point.