[Rivet] rivet-mkhtml recursively removes ${pwd}/plots without warning

[David Grellscheid]

Hi!

Please keep the core behaviour as it is now. Andy has mentioned most of
the arguments already. We've had it the other way round before, and that
was a real pain to work with. I much prefer the silent convenience of
overwriting the existing output.

The issue is more in the naming I think. A directory name that has Rivet
explicitly in the name is less likely to have pre-existed. Or we check
for a hidden 0-size file in the directory before deleting, to make sure
the directory is one of ours.

  David



On 08/10/15 12:03, Andy Buckley wrote:
> Hi David,
> 
> I'm not really sure why it would be a surprise. We equally don't warn or 
> stop users from running rivet if the output .yoda file already exists, 
> nor re. overwriting of the files and directories from rivet-cmp histos.
> 
> The core Unix shell tools also don't complain when they would overwrite 
> an existing file -- unless you specifically tell them to do so (for 
> those which have such an option). Personally I prefer the convenience of 
> the tools not objecting to overwrites. A priori if I run any command 
> that would logically write into the same dir as a previous run, I should 
> not expect my existing data to remain intact -- that's not just 
> restricted to Rivet & friends!
> 
> I was going to add the printed warning that you suggested, then changed 
> my mind -- by the time they've seen the message the damage is already 
> done, and we'd "need" to add similar messages to every tool in the Rivet 
> (and YODA) suite. It just seems like extra noise to me. But maybe others 
> disagree?
> 
> Andy
> 
> 
> On 08/10/15 11:48, David Bjergaard wrote:
>> Hi All,
>>
>> Luckily I didn't lose any plots that I was attached to, but I did have a ./plots
>> folder that was using to store intermediate results.  Removing any files without
>> warning the user is kind of scary which is what I think this line does:
>>      > if os.path.exists(opts.OUTPUTDIR) and not os.path.realpath(opts.OUTPUTDIR)==os.getcwd():
>>      >     import shutil
>>      >     shutil.rmtree(opts.OUTPUTDIR)
>> Why can't you throw an exception and say "OUTPUTDIR not empty, please use -f to
>> force overwriting", or less ideal but still better "OUTPUTDIR is not empty,
>> removing" so that its less of a surprise when all the subdirectories in
>> OUTPUTDIR have mysteriously vanished.
>>
>>      David
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> 
>