A home for underappreciated errors

[roger peppe]

On 10 February 2015 at 10:20, William Reade <william.reade at canonical.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 10, 2015 at 12:13 PM, William Reade
> <william.reade at canonical.com> wrote:
>> really ought to include a bunch more mechanism for finding out
>> *precisely* what should have been assigned to what
>
> To be clear: I do not think we should do this, because the
> interpretation of those entities would themselves be domain-specific
> -- if client code is written to expect a unit id and ends up suddenly
> seeing a volume id, the *best* case is that it fails -- the worst is
> that it keeps on running with bad data and smearing the effects of the
> bug further through the system with arbitrary further fallout.
>
> +100 to domain-specific errors.

Agreed. FWIW this issue is made worse by the choice that has been
made not to mask errors by default, which means that it's easier for
a lower level error from some subsystem to creep out into the light
and be acted on erroneously.