Re: error handling, logging, debugging and trouble-shooting

On Sat, 02 Apr 2011 12:02:20 -0400
will kahn-greene <[email protected]> wrote:

> verification
> ------------
> 
> We added some configuration verification stuff to PyBlosxom which you
> can run on the command line.  This enables PyBlosxom to tell you what's
> horribly wrong with your config.py file and also ask plugins to do the
> same.  The problem here is two-fold:
> 
> 1. since it's run from the command line and not the web-server, this
> can't point out any permissions issues

this can be solved by telling users "when you do a verification on commandline, be sure to run it as the same user your web process runs as"; if they have any problem with this, I would classify it as PEBKAC


> 2. Change logging so that it:
> 
> 2.1. always logs to stderr
Why would you do this?
stderr is for errors and warnings. regular output should go stdout.
I don't like it when software violates this.  If you have a restriction like "cannot use stdout because that's for page content in CGI, or something like that" , still only use stderr for errors/warnings, if you want to log regular things but you can't use stdout, use a logfile.

> I bring this up now because I'm increasingly of the mind that problems
> with troubleshooting are awful enough that we should alleviate some of
> them for 1.5.  Amongst other things, it helps us solve a bunch of other
> problems more easily. 

Agreed bigtime: as a newcomer who jumped into 1.5 right away, I can tell you figuring out issues was (and still is) a big pain. The good news is, we can only improve ;)

Dieter

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