[Duplicity-talk] poor handling of failure to create restore directory?

[Tom Roche]

IMHO duplicity does not handle failure to create the restore directory
gracefully, but I Could Be Wrong (tm). If so, please let me know how; if
not, please tell me whether/how to submit the bug.

Tom Roche Wed, 01 Sep 2010 13:37:48 -0400
http://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/duplicity-talk/2010-09/msg00002.html
> 2 Restore with

> address@hidden:~$ sudo duplicity file:///media/HD/FOO/home/foo ${HOME}-restore

...

> Is there a better way to do step 2? `sudo` was required to avoid
> errors. (I'll post about that separately.)

Context: I'm attempting to transfer /home/foo on hostname=FOO to 
/home/bar on hostname=BAR. I backed up FOO:/home/foo via

address@hidden:~$ duplicity ${HOME} file:///media/HD/FOO/home/foo

then attempted to do

- address@hidden:~$ duplicity file:///media/HD/FOO/home/foo ${HOME}-restore

This failed to create /home/foo-restore, then spewed one error line
per file in the backup, e.g.

> Local and Remote metadata are synchronized, no sync needed.
> Last full backup date: Thu Aug 26 22:12:58 2010
> Error '('Error creating directory /home/bar-restore', 7)' processing .
> Skipping .ICEauthority because of previous error
> Skipping .Xauthority because of previous error
... and so on.

This seems bad! Notably because, at one line per error, for a
reasonable-size backup, one easily blows out the terminal buffer, and
then cannot see the "true" error message at the beginning, i.e.

> 'Error creating directory /home/bar-restore'

I contend that, if duplicity cannot create the restore directory, it
should exit with a single message and an error code immediately. Am I
missing something? If not, should I report this bug? If so, where?

FWIW, Tom Roche <address@hidden>