[vdr] Re: Error handling vs. user friendliness.

[Rainer Zocholl <UseNet-Posting-Nospam-74308-@zocki.toppoint.de>]

Klaus.Schmidinger@cadsoft.de(Klaus Schmidinger)  03.01.05 16:23


>Josef Wolf wrote:
>> On Mon, Jan 03, 2005 at 01:38:53PM +0100, Klaus Schmidinger wrote:
>>
>>
>>>>Am I the only one who finds VDR's error handling strategies
>>>>somewhat inconvenient?  Here are some examples:
>>>>
>>>>- VDR refuses to start up when some programmed recording timer
>>>> refers to an unknown channel.  I stumbled over this when I
>>>> programmed a short test recording and reorganized channels.conf
>>>> thereafter.
>>>>
>>>> Is there any reason _not_ to just ignore (or give a warning) on
>>>> bad recording timer entries?
>>>
>>
>> In this situation VDR completely refuses to start up.  How can the
>> recording be done when VDR don't start up?

>By refusing to start up it forces the user to fix the problem.

Now adays VDR is often started automatically.
There will be no user to fix the errors...
Worse: that would cause the box to run 24h nonstop,
and may cause a fire as there will be no shutdown events
anymore and the box may overheat...
A big hardware damage only because a non gracefull error
handling.


>How did that offending timer get in there in the first place?

By a bug in VDR timer/channel handling?
Nothing is perfect.

All will look good until the next automatic reboot...

Once upon at time, when VDR was not able to modify 
channels.conf the behaviour was absolutely ok:
Only the user could have made the error and would
notice it this way really fast and correct it ASAP.
But now?
VDR itself could make the errornous entry (if sh*t could happen, it will happen)
but OTOH VDR could now comment out the duplicate channels/wrong timer too,
if it not already commented out.

Same with timers:
Only the user could have added a timer o an non existing channel
and the immediate "death" shows the user his error.



Discussions like this could be avoided if it always is documented
(in code) "why" something was done the way it was done.
That information gets lost with the time otherwise and 
"cargo cult code" is left over as no one has the heart to remove it.




Rainer