create debug logs but erase them on success

To help understand hard-to-replicate failures, add an option to always generate a debug log but to erase it as a final step if an operation succeeds. If an operation fails, keep the log and print a message pointing to it.

Maybe, save such logs somewhere under .git/annex and have a command to upload them (over https and encrypted with @joeyh's key?) to some server where they can be examined.

rejected --Joey

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comment 1

I'm doubtful about this:

It's not super likely that a debug log will have enough information in it to replicate a one-off problem. At best they generally provide some clues that need to be confirmed with experiments, so the problem needs to be reproduced before I can fix it.
This risks accumulating a bunch of debug logs if the user is doing things that fail. Things can fail for a wide array or reasons that do not need to be debugged, eg git-annex get fails all the time for valid reasons such as a host not being accessible or drive not being mounted.
A debug log might contain some sensitive information, git-annex should certianly not be sending them around without the user's eyes on them.
If the user noticed git-annex is accumulating a bunch of debug logs, and does feel they are sensitive information, they may lose trust in git-annex.

Comment by joey — Mon Mar 16 18:09:30 2020

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comment 2

When testing a new version of git-annex-remote-googledrive, I often use a wrapper script like this:

# .zshrc.local

f_git_annex () {
        log_file=$(mktemp "$(git rev-parse --git-dir 2>/dev/null)/annex/debug.XXX.log" 2>/dev/null)
        if [ $? -ne 0 ]; then
                echo "Error creating log file. Proceeding without logging."
                git annex $@
                return $?
        fi

        git annex $@ --debug 2> $log_file
        if [ $? -ne 0 ]; then
                echo "Errors occurred. Debug log in $log_file"
                return $?
        else
                rm $log_file
        fi
      }
alias ga='f_git_annex'

It's good enough for me in those cases. Changing the first line of the function to something like this log_file=$(umask 077; mktemp /tmp/annex.debug.XXX.log" 2>/dev/null) would help against accumulating logs.

Comment by lykos — Thu Mar 26 20:36:28 2020

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