First, great job on HackyInstaller!  Your software is going to make the
lives of many people easier, especially here at U. Maryland.

I agree!

First, when I used the command to set the host and key, I made the
mistake of appending the slash hackystat to the host.

This should not be an error; it should be legal to specify the hackystat
host with or without the trailing slash.   This brings up a few questions
in my mind:

(a) how does hackyInstaller check for the host being alive?  Does it
manually add a "/hackystat" onto the host string?  If so, that's part of
the problem.  I think that the ServerProperties operations manage the
trailing slash issue correctly, and you should be using these operations to
manipulate the host string.

(b) not all hackystat hosts are rooted in <host>/hackystat.  It is possible
to specify a context root in sensor.properties that changes the suffix.
(This doesn't come up frequently in practice, but, for example, we need
this for the daily build where we build multiple configurations.)  That
needs to be added in as a "common property", I believe. (Please add this to
Jira, but wait a bit to fix it until other issues are taken care of.)

Can you please add diagnostic information for all failures, as specified
in the RFC on 05-May-2005?

That would be helpful.  Also, what about the log file?  Julie, have you
fixed that yet? Note that ServerProperties has a method called something
like StackTraceToString that allows you to insert the full stack trace into
the log file.

I tried to use HackyInstaller to set a property for Eclipse (the
directory in which it is installed).  However, as described in the RFC,
I used "-SetProperty Eclipse /a/asteria.cs.umd.edu/junkfood/m/mpauldin".
 It took me some time (and parsing the hackyinstaller.xml file) to
realize that the property name is ECLIPSE_HOME.  Is it possible for
HackyInstaller to output the available properties if the user does not
specify a valid one?

Oops.  The HackyInstaller folks did publish an update regarding these
properties, which I unfortunately neglected to send on to everyone.  If
HackyInstaller can list all of the properties it knows about, that would
indeed be useful. Is that possible under the current design?

On another front, can you incorporate the full specification of the command
line interface (along with any updates you've made to it) into the page
that's displayed when doing an About | Help?  Eventually this will go into
the DocBook documentation.

[EMAIL PROTECTED]:~> java -jar hackyInstaller.jar -InstallOrUpdateSensor
Eclipse
The  property cannot be null.
Rhino classes (js.jar) not found - Javascript disabled
There was an error collecting Sensor information.  Please contact the
administrator.
[EMAIL PROTECTED]:~>

This again is an example of not enough diagnostic information.  For one
thing, the first line isn't "failure", which is not good.  The log file
should contain the complete stack trace.  It is not clear what to do
following an "error collecting Sensor information".

Again, HackyInstaller team: you have done a great job on the software (I
particularly like the GUI).  What I have listed above are minor kinks,
which should be relatively easy to resolve.  Thanks for your help.

Agreed.

Cheers,
Philip

Reply via email to