a little introduction:
i am forced to use windows on my work laptop and workstation, also my wife needs windows.
my "servers" would be linux, i am actually using fedora and i upgraded from fc17 since i was not able to get a recent version of git annex to compile there.

what happens, is that once i try to copy from the windows machine where the file is to the linux through ssh+rsync, i receive this error - as long as the user owning the linux repository isn't root:

    c:\locale>git annex copy --to linux myfile
    copy myfile (checking linux...) (to linux...)
    rsync: failed to open "/linux/annex/tmp/SHA256E-s10--937a89b559820f8658892"
    myfile
          10 100%    0.00kB/s    0:00:00 (xfer#1, to-check=0/1)
    rsync error: syntax or usage error (code 1) at /home/lapo/package/rsync-3.0.9-1/src/rsyn
    total size is 10  speedup is 0.09
    failed
    git-annex: copy: 1 failed

the file in tmp has no permissions at all:

    me@linux annex]$ ls -lart tmp/SHA256E-s10--937a89b559820f86588921ef3eb12c13074d078b62ef205bb597bf2e895408c3
    ----------. 1 me me 10 Oct 13 22:50 tmp/SHA256Es10--937a89b559820f86588921ef3eb12c13074d078b62ef205bb597bf2e895408c3

(just consider the following if the above makes any sense:) in another case (i cannot reproduce it now, possibly due to having upgraded git annex from some 2012 release), it happened that a failed download via copy/move from linux to windows (failed for permissions) would not be recorded as failed (on windows side), causing files to possibly be killed at the first subsequent drop command.

my question is: are these 0-permissions on tmp files a bug or just due to some ignorance i did put in setting up the git/annex repo ? is a git/annex repo to be run solely as root/sudoer ? or shall i take any other step in configuring it ? 

technicalities:

"client": windows version:

    git-annex version: 4.20131002-gf25991c

"server": linux version:

    git-annex version: 3.20130207

> [[done]]; fixed in newer git-annex versions. --[[Joey]]