Hi Michael, Michael Hunter wrote: > On Tue, 26 Jun 2007 17:18:15 +0100 > Darren Kenny <Darren.Kenny at Sun.COM> wrote: > > [...] >> I understand what you're saying, but I think any user would find it strange >> that >> when they load the UI there are value fields being flagged as invalid - >> generally you would only want to see errors that *you*, as the user, has >> made, >> not what anyone else did, otherwise it'd be quite confusing. Still, there >> may be >> some value to what you suggest, just it could be difficult to handle in a >> "user >> friendly" way, I'll have to think about it a bit more... > > I just dealt with dtpower(1M) being unwilling to load a config or save > over a broken config. This is really very unusable. This kind of > error handling is tough. Initially I think being willing to say "dump > to file and delete or don't load" is fine. As time goes on though we > are going to have to develop strategies for dealing with the uglier > types of broken config we run across. This is no different then what > we should do if it was a flat file.
I'm not saying that the UI shouldn't write over a broken configuration - it definitely should - what I'm saying is that on loading, a "valid" configuration should be passed to the UI - if the entry in the repository is broken then so be it - from the UI perspective it would still be valid to overwrite the broken configuration, since it's quite likely that the user would change things since it's not currently working. > >> As a question here, how is it proposed that the NWAM daemon would handle >> invalid >> configuration - simply ignore them/report an error and/or fail to start? > [...] > > Mostly the second. Possible some of the first. The third is just so > unusable as to not even be under consideration. It is dangerous to do > the first if you think there is any possibility it creates a security > problem. I'm fairly sure that we should at least inform the user that the current configuration is broken and what they are seeing is a modified/sanitised version of this configuration. Thanks, Darren.
