On Thu, Oct 21, 2021 at 3:49 PM Jeffrey Birt <bir...@soigeneris.com> wrote:
> Say you are a new owner of an M100 and you try to load ‘file.ba’ which > shows up in the menu as ‘file.do’, what will you guess the problem is. You > might try it again and get the same result and get pretty frustrated. > > Generally, these are newb problems. And it's frustrating but the whole thing is a learning process. I'll say max frustration is when TS-DOS loads FILE.BA anyway and then silently crashes your filesystem resulting in eventual crash/hang/data-loss. If newb sees FILE.BA presented as FILE.DO it at least poses the question to the newb's mind as to what is happening. And gives them a giant clue that the extension on the original file was wrong. Leading to more research. What do they do next? Probably inload FILE.DO and they will see that it has the proper content. Then they can just load FILE.DO they will see that it has the proper content. They can then load it from DO file into BASIC. If it's too big to load with the DO file in RAM, maybe they will research how to inload a DO file directly into BASIC using either the DOS LOAD"0:FILE.DO or LOAD"COM: command. Eventually in this learning process newb will learn the difference between BA and DO files and the darkness is lifted. > If I copy ‘file.ba’ to my SD card and then it does not show up as being > on the card I will again be frustrated as I won’t know why this is > happening. > > Yes. I think that would be frustrating. But less frustrating than crash/hang/data loss. The only real value to this option is avoiding crash/hang/data loss and raising a question in the newb's mind for further research (ask on list, or read the documentation). > I have been chatting with the developer about an error message. The > concern there is that there are a limited number of error messages that > TS-DOS supports, and the user would need to be able to associate the error > to what the problem was. We all know how frustrating a seemly meaningless > error message is. > > > Yes. But fundamentally it's the user's fault. All we can do is try to give them a route to figure out what they are doing wrong. All these proposed ideas (including what I actually did in LaddieAlpha) have that in mind. To help the user to figure out their mistake without actually getting the crash/hang/data-loss. If you go the error route, I'm not sure what error you choose matters too much. What's important is that the user can discern the error and look it up in the documentation for the disk service or disk client. Of course the other thing is what is causing this trouble... club100's file archive. The problem is so many files have the wrong extension there. If those were fixed, the incidents would go way down. -- John.
