Somehow reduce the number of log files created by third party libraries

@john-science Did some cool work to make our logging stuff implicitly rub off on TPLs, but an unfortunate side effect of this is that we get lots of empty log files, which I assume are being created when the library instantiates its logging object. Would it be possible to either automagically clean these up, or perhaps even lazily create the file on first write? something like that. Not super high priority, but would be really nice.

[jakehader]

I believe so! I haven’t seen as many log files around with the changes, but I can reopen if I see them again.

[john-science]

@youngmit Sure thing!

The obvious solution is:

Delete the empty log file when we do “concat logs” at the end of a run. Easy.

Since only child processes create log files, I think modifying the “concat logs” functionality would be safe and complete.

Another option would be to:

Start child loggers without any handlers, and only add a FileHandler the first time someone calls .log().

The second solution feels more elegant, it is certainly more Pythonic. But I feel like the first solution leaves the code in a much more predictable state at all times.

Maybe I’ll do both! Let me play with it.