Tor can't create the ControlPortWriteToFile file if it is to be placed into the not-yet-existant datadir
assuming one launches tor like this:
tor DataDirectory /tor ControlPort auto ControlPortWriteToFile /tor/port.conf
and /tor doesn't exist yet, tor will warn that it couldn't write port.conf. It will afterwards happily create /tor, and if you rerun the command everything will work fine. That's kind of weird. We could decide this isn't a tor bug, and any path you pass to ControlPortWriteToFile must exist, but that's a bit inconsistent with our other *File options which will work that way, because they happen to be interpreted after the datadir is created. So I think we should decide this is a tor bug. Why are we opening ports before making our data dir anyway? Due to the need to drop permissions?
Marking this as major as it blocks a new package release with Vidalia 0.2.13