+1
I recently had a similar debate with Heikki about this. While having a goal of
no repository failures or chandler bugs in general is a laudable one,
preventing one from recovering from a failure when it happens is shooting
oneself in the foot.
Look at the recent blog post by Tim Bray on iCal:
http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2006/05/11/iCal-still-sucks
I sure don't want anyone to complain that Chandler sucks hugely because we
removed all the recovery facilities just because "they should never be
needed".
Andi..
On Mon, 15 May 2006, Bryan Stearns wrote:
Recent Chandler issues have produced situations where a user has needed to
"interact directly" with his/her repository:
- The repository is damaged and can't be opened
- The repository isn't damaged, but the last Chandler run died and left it
with broken UI structures, such that Chandler gets confused on startup and
crashes. (I think the problem Sheila just showed me falls into this case,
which is why I'm sending this now.)
- A corrupt repository needs to be sent to us.
- Additionally, it's sometimes useful to tell Chandler to --create a new
repository, but the user doesn't normally start Chandler from the command
line -- figuring out how to do this is an extra hurdle for the user to solve
in a situation where we've let him/her down.
I propose we add a mechanism to put up a dialog on startup if the user is
holding down a metakey (to be named later; we can figure one out that works
on all platforms and doesn't interfere with basic application launching);
this dialog would offer this radio-group of choices;
- Continue startup normally (the default, in case the metakey's inadvertently
down)
- Keep my data, but reset the UI information in my repository
- Discard my repository completely and start over
and optionally (a separate checkbox with two editfields)
- Send my repository to OSAF; here's my email address so OSAF can ask me
followup questions: [ ] and the number of the bug I filed about this: [
].
I proposed something like this a long time ago, and it generally got boo'd
down, I think because "we should just fix the bugs that leave the repository
in a bad state". I agree that we need to fix bugs like this, but for a while
yet we'll need a mechanism to help users affected by these problems, other
than "Just go find your profile directory and delete it. Oh, you don't know
what that is? Just start Chandler with the --create option. Oh, you've never
used a command line?"...)
...Bryan
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