Comment 2 for bug 346850

I ran into the same problem because I use tmpfs for /var/log and /usr/sbin/cherokee fails if one of the log-dirs does not exist.

<snip>
[06/06/2012 18:00:00.123] (error) logger_writer.c:304 - Could not open
    '/var/log/cherokee/cherokee.error' for appending | This is probably related
    to the file permissions. Please make sure that it is writable for the user
    under which Cherokee is run.
</snip>

IMHO the correct solution would be that the cherokee binary checks for logdir existance and tries to create missing ones.

As a workaround I inserted
'''if [ ! -d /var/log/cherokee ]; then mkdir /var/log/cherokee; fi'''
into line 31 of /etc/init.d/cherokee
(Just before the "start-stop-daemon --start" call)
This is only a hack because custom log-paths can be configured in /etc/cherokee/cherokee.conf !