Re: fhpd vs RuntimeExceptions

[Andrew Cagney <cagney at redhat dot com>]

Mark Wielaard wrote:
> Hi Andrew,
>
> On Thu, 2007-11-15 at 14:05 -0500, Andrew Cagney wrote:
>   
> > That unfortunatly isn't sufficient; the old code in CLI.java was 
> > differentiating between and NPE and other exceptions - dumping the stack 
> > when an NPE occured.  I'll restore this behavior; so we're at least back 
> > to a usable status quo (and from a HPD user prospective in a better 
> > position - these back-traces plain suck)
> >     
>
> OK, but I don't understand this heuristic with NullPointerException. You
> introduced a "nasty()" method (cute name) that gobbles up the Exception
> except if it is a NullPointerException or has an empty message. But that
> doesn't seem to cover other catastrophic failures like
> ClassCastException, ArrayOutOfBoundsException, ArithmeticException,
> IllegalArgumentException or NumberFormatException, etc. that might or
> might not have empty messages, but that are real core bugs if they occur
> and "bubble up" to the CLI.
>
>   
True, it gets rid of the immediate problem.  More importantly it lets us 
walk away from this bike shed and focus on more critical - a corrupt 
variable or wrong back-trace is far more serious than the exact text of 
an error message.  Just like how the dog hears in the farside cartoon 
<<Rover, blah blah blah ...>>, we've ensured that the user at least sees 
"Error: ".  As our user base expands we can refine this.

[...]
> That seems fine. I recommend you also just rip out the whole Message
> queuing structure and handle that in the same way with a simple
> printMessage(). Having two different mechanisms for creating user
> feedback in the CLI is probably confusing.
>
>   
Of course; however the cli code base is still in rehab from me 
refactoring N ways of implementing a command down to one.
Can you create a bug?

Andrew