When using a local git remote on eg a removable drive, error messages don't make clear if the problem occurred in the local git repo or the remote repo.
For example, I was copying files to a removable drive and got an error about a broken git object, but it was not clear which repo had the broken object in it.
This should be fixable by eg, catching all exceptions when running Annex operations on a remote, adding its path to the message and rethrowing. --Joey
I was exporting (with exporttree) to a directory remote on an external ext4 formatted USB drive. As is usually the case, there was permission problem. My current user did not have write permission for one directory I was exporting to. git-annex just printed "failed" after it actually completed the file transfer with 100%. Even with --verbose and --debug I could not figure out the problem until I discovered the permission problem.
Neither of the above 2 comments are what this todo item is about, which is specfically local git remotes.
However, the exception handling code was recently reworked, to make it display exceptions when things fail like described in those comments.