[rdiff-backup-users] rdiff-backup error handling

[Keith Edmunds]

One thing I've been pondering recently is rdiff-backup's error handling. 
This isn't a complaint - I'm a big fan of rdiff-backup and use it every 
day (well, night actually) - but the error handling could be better in 
my opinion. Current behaviour is a somewhat unfriendly Python stack dump 
in which is it often not immediately obvious what the problem is. 
Moreover, if the program was running with a low or zero verbosity 
setting, it is usually necessary to run it again "v5 or higher" to 
establish the file causing the problem.

Has anyone looked at providing an umbrella exception handling routine 
for rdiff-backup? I would envisage something that does the following:

- hides the stack dump (possibly writing it to a file) from the user, 
although the final line could be used
- identifies the file being backed up at the time of the error
- perhaps provides the command line used
- gives a summary of the error

Not entirely ideal, but maybe something like:

Oct 23 03:05:01 rdiff-backup failed:
Error: Truncated header string (problem probably originated remotely)
File: /home/fred/widgets.c
Command line: rdiff-backup /home remote::/backup/home
Details: /home/rdiff-backup/errorlog/1.txt

I don't think this is quite as easy to do as I may have implied above - 
I've conveniently left some questions unanswered - but I think it is 
worthy of consideration for the future.

Keith

--
Keith Edmunds

+---------------------------------------------------------------------+
|  Tiger Computing Ltd  |  Helping businesses make the most of Linux  |
|  "The Linux Company"  |    http://www.TheLinuxConsultancy.co.uk     |
+---------------------------------------------------------------------+