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

[Josef Wolf <jw@raven.inka.de>]

On Tue, Jan 04, 2005 at 01:27:51PM +0100, Klaus Schmidinger wrote:

> >Come on.  You don't expect me to remove about 2500 entries with the remote
> >control, do you?  Especially when VDR is restarting in irregular intervals.
> No. I was under the impression that you had edited the channel list
> while VDR was running.

At least as long as VDR refused to start up this was simply not possible. :)

> >How about dropping offending entries, giving a OSD/logfile (dalayed
> >until OSD is available) warning and _not_ write back the file on
> >shutdown?  This way no entires are lost, the warning reapears until
> >the problem is fixed and (finally) VDR will still be usable with a
> >broken channels.conf.
> 
> The channel list is not explicitly written back at shutdown.
> It is written whenever the user makes an explicit change to it,
> or every ten minutes if automatic updates have been made.
> 
> Ok, so in case of an error at startup we could turn off the automatic
> saving of channels.conf and only save it when the user explicitly
> makes a change.
> 
> However, what if the channels.conf file is so broken that no channels
> can be read at all?

Just put something like "123 out of 123 channels not usable" to the OSD
and let the user decide whether he wants to fix the problem immediately
or maybe just watch some recording and look for the problem later.
The syslog should contain enough information for the user to know what
to do to fix the problem, of course.

> Should VDR still start?

Definitely yes, IMHO.  The user might still want to watch a recording or
modify channel entries via OSD.  Give power to the user and let _him_
decide whether the problem is that important that he wants to shut down.

> What if only one or two channels are ok?

Warning: "121 out of 123 channels not usable"

> Where's the limit?

No limit.  What would a limit be good for?  Why do you want to make a
decision in favour before you even know what the user wants?  Just say
how many channels are good and how many are bad.  When the user decides
that 1 bad channel is too bad for him, he will go and shut down by
himself.  No need to make a decision when you don't have enough
information what the right answer would be for a given situation.
Give the user enough information that he can make a good decision.

-- 
No software patents!
-- Josef Wolf -- jw@raven.inka.de --