Scenario: A configuration has a dependency on another configuration through a QB repository.
If the dependency build is broken, the error message is:

"Dependency build not successful" (configuration:root/pathToConfig, build id: xyz)

If the repository has "Files to Retrieve" defined, the error message is:

java.io.IOException: Server returned HTTP response code: 500 for URL: http://quickbuild:8810/file_transfer?baseDir=c%3A%5Cqb3%5Cstorage%5Croot%pathToConfig%5Cbuilds%5Cxyz%2Fartifacts&filePatterns=filepattern.*&compress=false [...]

The reason for this misleading error message is, that no artifacts are published because of the broken build. Nevertheless the dependent build tries to retrieve them. As mentioned in [QB-770] the base directory for file transfers must exist. This is not the case, because the "artifacts" directory is created with the execution of a publish artifact step - but the build is broken at an earlier step.

Why even try to retrieve the artifacts, when the dependency build is broken?