story of a failure

[David Cheney]

Roger has my complete support to make our error messages as verbose as
he likes.

The error messages are for us, the developers, to diagnose our customers
problems. If the customers find the error messages tiresome, it is our
job to fix the errors, not make them more aesthetically pleasing.

Dave

On 27/04/13 07:20, roger peppe wrote:
> 
> On Apr 26, 2013 7:22 PM, "Gustavo Niemeyer" <gustavo at niemeyer.net
> <mailto:gustavo at niemeyer.net>> wrote:
>>
>> My 2 BRL cents:
>>
>> "cannot get login entity: cannot get user "admin": mongo query failed:
>> cannot acquire socket: cannot log in: error authorizing user "admin":
>> request failed: cannot read reply: EOF"
>>
>> This looks pretty good in comparison:
>>
>> "cannot get login entity: cannot get user "admin": database query
> failed: EOF"
>>
>> An EOF when talking to a database is generally a well understood concept.
> 
> Agreed that that error is less verbose and probably fine for many
> purposes, but from the point of view of diagnosing this problem, it also
> throws away important information - are we seeing this error when
> talking to an existing connection, or when making a new one?
> 
> I am concerned that currently by default we add no context to errors,
> and this has led us to the situation I described. After I have pointed
> out a place where a reported error is bad, we can jump in and change the
> code to add some context.
> 
> But that's too late! I would like a decent error message when we
> encounter conditions that have never been seen before. That is, I would
> like it if we erred on the overly verbose side, adjusting things later
> if we found them too verbose in practice - the opposite to our current
> approach.
> 
>> On Fri, Apr 26, 2013 at 3:09 PM, roger peppe <rogpeppe at gmail.com
> <mailto:rogpeppe at gmail.com>> wrote:
>> > After an experience trying to get to the bottom of a problem found when
>> > load-testing juju this morning, I was inspired to write this.
>> >
>> >
> https://docs.google.com/a/canonical.com/document/d/12i8jFLeXK95kz4ztzFy8FHor4Vtg39u0QkiyEW3dQaA/edit?usp=sharing
>> >
>> > PS Apologies for the awful formatting. I should have stuck to plain
> text.
>> >
>> >
>> > --
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>> > Modify settings or unsubscribe at:
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>> >
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>>
>> gustavo @ http://niemeyer.net
> 
> 
>