Rather than just fail silently, koha-rebuild-zebra should check file and directory ownership on necessary directories and complain loudly if the directories belong to root or are not writable by the Koha user.
+1 -- the check should look at least into /var/lib/koha/<user>, /var/lock/koha/<user> and directories and files under those. I struggled for a while before finding a permission problem under /var/lock/koha/<user>. Bad ownership on a lockfile was causing reindexing to failing silently, even with "-v -v".
Yes, we have a lot of failing silently, or exploding in a ball of meaningless errors going on in those scripts. I'd like to make a small script library that allows things (like this) to be sanity checked, and to provide useful tips for fixing things when they do get out of wack (which shouldn't happen, but sometimes does.)
Can't set this back to new if it's been accidentally marked something else. Anyway, we now have a script library this sort of thing could happen in.