[[!comment format=mdwn
 username="joey"
 subject="""comment 1"""
 date="2023-01-02T19:14:25Z"
 content="""
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.
"""]]
