[Opensim-dev] Error detection when storing an asset

Mon Apr 21 15:13:46 UTC 2014

Hi Oren,

FWIW, I agree with you completely wrt propagation of exceptions. I am
perhaps less concerned about whether this is ever reported to the user in
the viewer; that is a question for viewer developers to deliberate and
decide. To paraphrase Justin, whether a given piece of affected code
handles or ignores those exceptions is a different question entirely. For
me, it's about coding philosophy.

I am completely against any strategy that hides an error state. A properly
handled error state in the asset service might be the thing that first
alerts me to an impacted asset server, perhaps buying me sufficient time to
deal with it. In any event, I certainly don't want that call being made for
me by the programmer in a decision not to properly report an error
condition to the calling code. There are a shit-ton of other reasons why
this should never be done; but I'm not going to get crazy and start listing
them. Those who recognize the problem with doing things this way already
know, and the rest are wearing blinders and pedantically following legacy
practices.

My greater concern is that you will respond to the volume off these
objections rather than the number. There are two core dissenters, and they
are not superhuman (so neither correct nor otherwise in a state of grace by
default), so I would encourage you, if you really do think you have this
architectural issue solved, to pursue your case not for your own sake, but
for ours.

FYI I am not casting a vote as I am not core and so any vote I might cast
is not particularly relevant.

Cheers
James/Hiro

On Mon, Apr 21, 2014 at 9:54 AM, Oren Hurvitz <orenh at kitely.com> wrote:

> James, the only philosophical concern that I've heard is a desire to hide
> errors and present a false facade of 100% success to users. This was
> obfuscated by an attempt to claim that the errors could someday be fixed
> automatically, but that doesn't actually happen in today's OpenSim so it's
> not a valid point. Since I respect my users and value their time I have to
> let them know when I've failed to complete an action that they requested,
> so I reject this approach.
>
> A second possible objection is a practical one: will propagating
> exceptions cause other parts of the code, unrelated to the assets service,
> to fail? I don't know the answer to that, but I still refuse to pretend
> success in cases where I've failed.
>
> For these reasons, I have changed Kitely to propagate exceptions thrown in
> the communications system; it is already done. If this causes problems then
> I will see them and fix them. But in view of the surprising and vigorous
> opposition to this change I will not be contributing it to OpenSim.
>
> Oren
>
>
>
> On Mon, Apr 21, 2014 at 5:43 PM, James Stallings II <
> james.stallings at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Parhaps it would be interesting to hear whether Oren has obtained to some
>> elegant way of addressing these concerns.
>>
>> Cheers
>>
>>
>> On Sun, Apr 20, 2014 at 11:08 PM, Trinity <trinity93 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Im in mels camp on this one.
>>>
>>>
>>> Trinity Bays
>>>
>>>
>>> On Sat, Apr 19, 2014 at 4:14 AM, Melanie <melanie at t-data.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> These "other places" are what I'm worried about. There are a lot of
>>>> them and each of them would need to have code added. Exception handling
>>>> code is one of the worst types of code because the "try" is a scope, so
>>>> locals devlared in the try, like bool result = MethodToTry(); will have to
>>>> be split up into declaring the bool outside the scope and assigning it
>>>> inside - incredibly ugly for code that wants to be reference and teaching
>>>> code as well as a functioning system.
>>>>
>>>> - Melanie
>>>>
>>>> On 19 Apr 2014, at 08:02, Oren Hurvitz <orenh at kitely.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> My fix has two parts.
>>>>
>>>> The first is that the Store() operation needs to understand failures
>>>> correctly. There has been a consensus that it should, so I'll add that to
>>>> Git.
>>>>
>>>> The second is that MakeRequest() should propagate exceptions, instead
>>>> of just returning null (which is what it does now). So far there have been
>>>> 3 votes for this (me, Mike Chase, and Justin) and 2 against (Melanie,
>>>> Diva). That's very close; does anyone else want to make their position
>>>> known?
>>>>
>>>> Next, I see that there's confusion in this discussion about what
>>>> happens in Store() if MakeRequest() throws an exception. And the answer is,
>>>> nothing will be different, because Store() already correctly catches
>>>> exceptions. That is precisely how it should work: the low-level
>>>> communications system reports when it has failed, and higher levels (that
>>>> know the business value of the call) decide how to handle it. However,
>>>> MakeRequest() is called from other places as well and they might need to be
>>>> changed to handle exceptions better.
>>>>
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>>>
>>>
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>>
>>
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>
>
> --
> Oren Hurvitz
> VP R&D
> Kitely Ltd.
>
> Email: orenh at kitely.com <ilan at kitely.com>
>
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