[Bug 1463561] [NEW] adt-run eats its log dir for breakfast

[Selene Scriven]

Public bug reported:

Before running any tests, adt-run does a 'rm -rf' of its log directory,
and aborts if this causes any errors.

This is a problem because it's dangerous, it's unintuitive, and it
breaks unix conventions.

Dangerous:  Ever tried using $HOME as the log dir?  When an attempt to
use /tmp for logging fails due to permission issues, the next obvious
choice is to use '.' or $HOME, which can cause disaster.

Unintuitive: The obvious first choices for a log dir are places like
/tmp, ., $HOME, and /var/log.  None of these actually work, and fail
with a traceback.  It's awkward to require a directory which doesn't
even exist.

Breaks conventions: In general, most tools want to have a parent
directory or an existing directory specified for their logging, as in
the list of common directories above.  Then the convention-compliant
tool either writes logs to that directory (without first 'rm -rf'ing it)
or creates a new child subdirectory such as /tmp/foo.24153/ to store
results in.  adt-run does not do this, which creates surprising results.

Could we change the log dir behavior of adt-run to be safer and more
similar to other tools?

** Affects: autopkgtest (Ubuntu)
     Importance: Undecided
         Status: New

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1463561

Title:
  adt-run eats its log dir for breakfast

Status in autopkgtest package in Ubuntu:
  New

Bug description:
  Before running any tests, adt-run does a 'rm -rf' of its log
  directory, and aborts if this causes any errors.

  This is a problem because it's dangerous, it's unintuitive, and it
  breaks unix conventions.

  Dangerous:  Ever tried using $HOME as the log dir?  When an attempt to
  use /tmp for logging fails due to permission issues, the next obvious
  choice is to use '.' or $HOME, which can cause disaster.

  Unintuitive: The obvious first choices for a log dir are places like
  /tmp, ., $HOME, and /var/log.  None of these actually work, and fail
  with a traceback.  It's awkward to require a directory which doesn't
  even exist.

  Breaks conventions: In general, most tools want to have a parent
  directory or an existing directory specified for their logging, as in
  the list of common directories above.  Then the convention-compliant
  tool either writes logs to that directory (without first 'rm -rf'ing
  it) or creates a new child subdirectory such as /tmp/foo.24153/ to
  store results in.  adt-run does not do this, which creates surprising
  results.

  Could we change the log dir behavior of adt-run to be safer and more
  similar to other tools?

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