I'm having trouble sharing an rsync remote between two users (as a "transfer" repository). git-annex thinks rsync fails because it can't set the permissions on the root directory on the destination. I've added --perms --chmod=Dug+rwxs,Fug+rw,o-rwx to annex-rsync-options so all users in the specified group on the destination can create and delete files. However, I see in the logs errors like:

sending incremental file list
./
rsync: failed to set permissions on "/home/shared-xfer/.": Operation not permitted (1)
2fe/985/GPGHMACSHA1--b36ce0a18718e7ea7cf9827c2748608df7152dfc/GPGHMACSHA1--b36ce0a18718e7ea7cf9827c2748608df7152dfc

         32,768   0%    0.00kB/s    0:00:00  
      3,359,405 100%    4.78MB/s    0:00:00 (xfr#1, to-chk=0/5)
rsync error: some files/attrs were not transferred (see previous errors) (code 23) at main.c(1165) [sender=3.1.1]
[2014-10-18 15:16:24 EDT] chat: gpg ["--batch","--no-tty","--use-agent","--quiet","--trust-model","always","--batch","--passphrase-fd","22","--symmetric","--force-mdc","--no-textmode"]
[2014-10-18 15:16:24 EDT] read: rsync ["-e","'ssh' '-S' '.git/annex/ssh/blah@blah' '-o' 'ControlMaster=auto' '-o' 'ControlPersist=yes' '-l' 'blah' '-T'","--perms","--chmod=Dug+rwxs,Fug+rw,o-rwx","--progress","--recursive","--partial","--partial-dir=.rsync-partial","/blah/.git/annex/tmp/rsynctmp/24863/","blah@blah:/home/shared-xfer/"]

  rsync failed -- run git annex again to resume file transfer

The transfer actually completes fine, except for setting permissions of the root directory on the destination (which I don't really care about, because I have manually set them to be correct). Is it possible for git-annex to copy the contents of the directory to rsync remotes? For the example above, instead of /blah/.git/annex/tmp/rsynctmp/24863/, /blah/.git/annex/tmp/rsynctmp/24863/2fe would work. I can't come up with an alternate solution for this server, except using the same remote user (which I'd prefer not to do).