[Opensim-dev] Error detection when storing an asset

Mon Apr 21 15:15:11 UTC 2014

Bah, too bad I cant edit a sent email, as I mangled the last paragraph.

The TL;DR:

Don't give up so damned easy Oren ;)

On Mon, Apr 21, 2014 at 10:13 AM, James Stallings II <
james.stallings at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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.
>>>>>
>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>> Opensim-dev mailing list
>>>>> Opensim-dev at opensimulator.org
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>>>>> _______________________________________________
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>>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
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>>>>
>>>
>>>
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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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>>
>
>
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> ===================================
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>
>

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