Re: [Monotone-devel] Error handling via automate

[Nathaniel Smith]

On Mon, Sep 11, 2006 at 12:55:36PM +0200, Jon Bright wrote:
> Thomas Keller wrote:
> >
> >This, however, doesn't solve at all the problem how a client application
> >should be able to "weight" the fatalness of an error. 
> 
> Right.  Being that the current error handling doesn't have any knowledge 
> about "fatalness", though, I'd suggest:
> 
> 1. Make errors exit from automate stdio
> 2. Provide a way to mark errors as "don't need restart"
> 3. Mark non-fatal errors as "don't need restart" as and when they're 
> discovered and manually examined to make sure that that's true.

And one can also use step 3 to incrementally figure out which errors
can occur for each command, and give them a number and document them.
So we'd have two classes of errors, "unknown errors" which give a
natural language message and exit stdio, and "known errors" which give
a numeric message in addition to a natural language message, are
documented, and do not cause stdio to exit.  With the number of the
former decreasing and the number of the latter increasing, over time.

-- Nathaniel

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